(brass band music)
- So we're checking out Shohko Cafe
and this is like the first
Japanese restaurant in all of New Mexico.
It's this Japanese hippie family
that lived in a van in California
and decided to make Santa Fe their home.
And what they wanted to do was share
a little bit of their food
with the people of New Mexico.
(brass band music)
Hello! - Hi, I'm Ayame Fukuda!
- Hi Ayame! - Hi Sheldon nice to meet you.
This is my mother and father's restaurant,
they opened it in 1975.
And my mother's name is Shohko.
It's called Shohko Cafe.
The building is an original adobe building,
built around 200 years ago
and this is a really old, former bordello, actually.
- [Sheldon] I heard there's a green chile tempura
that is amazing.
- Green chile tempura is, as far as we know,
an invention being made by my mother in the early 70s.
- We'll be rolling up some sushi too.
- Yeah, that'll be fun.
We had a neighbor, Margaret Zamora,
when we lived in Albuquerque for about six months
and Margaret would teach my mother
northern New Mexican cooking.
She was showing her how to make a chile relleno,
and she's like, "Oh, that process is so similar to tempura!"
She decided to try the green chile with the tempura.
This is Sheldon, Chef Sheldon.
- Hi, nice to meet you man.
- And Jesus is our tempura chef today.
- [Sheldon] We're gonna slice it through,
and we're gonna just do traditional style tempura.
- [Ayame] He's dipping the green chile into the batter.
(hip hop music)
- I love it, look at that, the batter is perfect.
Sometimes the tempura batter gets too, too heavy
so it's just clunky and it just falls.
You want all of these ribbons to come off of it
so that it's light and crispy.
To this day, your mom is still in the kitchen,
cooking around? - [Ayame] Yep, everyday.
She's the hardest working one here.
- Was your mom trained?
- She was trained by Isao Kosaka,
this Japanese chef with French training.
We sent him to Japan to learn everything,
and he came back and he taught my mom.
So, now it's your turn to make
shrimp stuffed green chile tempura for us.
- [Sheldon] Okay.
So we stretch out the shrimp,
and then it gets stuffed in like that.
- [Ayame] That's like stuffing cheese
when making chile relleno. - [Sheldon] Yeah, yeah.
- [Ayame] So you're gonna dip it in the batter
nice and light.
You're gonna glide it in.
- [Sheldon] How did people react to
Japanese food here in New Mexico at first?
- Well, they embraced our food,
but they also didn't know what it was, you know?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of people would come in asking for chow mein
and egg foo young and that kind of thing.
And then we integrated them into our very early menu.
- Kind of ease everyone into it.
- Exactly.
- And then now it's totally Japanese.
- Absolutely. Completely Japanese.
(jazz funk guitar)
(laughing)
- Grandma.
- Plate it up like that the next time, again.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- [Ayame] This is our chef Victor.
- So Victor, how long have you been at Shohko?
- 11 years.
- You're from Guatemala.
- Yeah, I'm from Guatemala.
- How long ago did you come to New Mexico?
- 12 years.
- 12 years ago? Why Santa Fe?
- Santa Fe is like small city,
people here like friendly,
and I have some family here too before I came.
- His brother Felix worked here as a sushi chef also.
When my father opened his ramen restaurant
Naruto in Albuquerque, he took Felix with him. (laughs)
- Okay.
- They used to stand here side-by-side.
- Wow that's amazing to see that.
How was it training under Shohko?
She was strict?
- Yeah.
- [Ayame] She says, "Looks beautiful, tastes good."
Victor invented his famous Victor Roll.
- [Sheldon] So we got some fresh scallops.
- [Ayame] The searing brings out all the oil to the surface.
Wonderful flavors and umami.
This is pickled burdock root.
- [Victor] The cucumber, avocado,
the bigeye tuna.
- [Sheldon] Bigeye.
(hip hop music)
- [Ayame] Avocado and then the seared scallop.
So he's using two types of tobiko,
squid ink, and then wasabi infused.
- There's a lot of great texture going on in this roll.
- [Ayame] Oh yeah.
(hip hop music)
- The first sushi restaurant opened in 1970 in California.
- Uh-huh.
- And you guys opened up in '75.
- '75.
- So you guys were in the first wave of
people knowing about sushi here.
- I'm pretty amazed myself,
I'm not sure how it worked out.
- [Ayame] Mm-hmm.
Mmm.
- That's delicious.
The best part is the masago.
- I know, that crunchiness in there.
- Popping in your teeth. - Yeah.
- We're in a landlocked state,
where'd you guys get fish from?
- So when we first opened in '75,
you couldn't get any fish in Santa Fe.
We would contact fish vendors from LA,
and we would have to put in an order
the week before or whatever.
And then have the fish flown in.
We would have to go pick it up at the airport.
So every week my mom would sort of survey her customers,
Tuna?
What do you want, yellowtail,
do you want to have octopus?
And that would help her decide
what fish to order for the next week.
- I love how light it is,
and you can literally like...
(crunching)
(Ayame laughing)
Hear the crispiness of it.
- Oh yeah, I see.
We have three different kinds of dipping sauces,
so that's the traditional bonito dipping broth.
The idea is to balance the oiliness
of the tempura with the sauces.
- It's funny that you say the oiliness,
but this is one of the lightest tempuras I've ever had.
- Oh wow, that's cool!
So before we lived in Santa Fe, we lived
like nomads all across the west coast.
We lived in a van pretty much.
In a van (laughs).
So my parents were really unconventional Japanese people.
(laughing)
They met in art school in Tokyo.
They didn't feel that they fit into normal Japanese culture.
And my mom was a painter, my dad was a creative,
graphic thinker and head photographer for
The World Macrobiotic Foundation Magazine.
And there was a contest sponsored by a big magazine in Japan
and he won (laughs). - [Sheldon] Wow.
- Yeah.
They would pay for him to go anywhere in the world
to take pictures.
This is the mid-60s.
- The hippies and civil rights movement.
So he went to LA and San Francisco and Berkeley.
- Oh, right in the mix of it.
- Yeah, yeah.
Even though they were like hippies
and kind of radical in their thinking
in terms of getting away from Japan.
When they got here, it's all they had.
They didn't have other Japanese people to
have a community with.
So I feel like they became more Japanese
raising us here in Santa Fe.
And so at home, we pretty much...
It was all Japanese macrobiotic food.
Western American hippies
totally were attracted to this way of thinking.
And they were like, "Oh my god, Hiro and Shohko from Japan!
Teach us what is Japanese food,
teach us about Japanese culture."
- So from there they decided that they'd open a new location
into a restaurant. - Into a restaurant.
- The green chile and shrimp works well together.
Your Santa Fe roll.
I love how the freshness of the
green chile still comes through.
You know, creamy against that crispiness of the tempura.
- By the time we were in New Mexico,
I was about five.
My sisters were three and one.
You know we were in the van,
we didn't really have a home and anyplace was home.
Take a bath in the river,
and then move on to the next place.
We'd go to communes.
I hadn't had any formal training in school,
and I wasn't reading books.
My language level was not up to par at the age.
So my parents were like, "Poor Ayame,
we need to get her into school."
And we ended up settling here.
- What's recent times here in Santa Fe?
There seems to be really, really artsy downtown.
- I think the Georgia O'Keeffe
and Santa Fe arts movement attracted a lot of people
from the east coast and the west coast to come here.
There's an upside to it and a downside to it, you know?
Economically it's hard for the
people who have been here for a really long time
to fit in and own property
as the newcomers are coming in
and raising the property prices.
So that's kind of one of our big issues.
I have amazing legacy here with my family to carry forward
and we want to invite everyone to enjoy it.
And how do you get people to do that?
You know, you wanna,
"Hey well try this it's got green chile in it."
And integration of different cultures.
I think that that's been a key
to why people love it here so much.
(ragtime music)
- What signifies Santa Fe New Mexican cuisine?