On a blazing Wednesday afternoon in West Los Angeles, a young woman named Eri is artfully slicing sashimi with an extremely sharp blade. Four or five feet away, her colleague Enrique is constructing maki with metronomic precision. Nearby, two men are cooking enormous tubs of rice as two women carefully assemble an array of nigiri and maki on catering trays. A couple more staffers fill small handbaskets with packaged sushi servings to replenish the refrigerated shelves that are the centerpiece of Yama Sushi Marketplace, one of the more remarkable sushi purveyors in L.A.
Eri, who spent five years doing fine-dining kitchen work in Tokyo before moving to L.A. a year ago, takes her knife, with a long blade and single-beveled edge used only for sashimi, to make light work of a glistening slab of buttery hamachi, a fatty piece of salmon, and a highly marbled tuna belly. “It’s important that they’re all exactly the same thickness,” she says nonchalantly, as she arranges her handiwork on disposable serving plates and then slides a few feet to an adjacent workstation to make half a dozen plates of nigiri, that classic oval mound of vinegared rice topped by a slice of raw fish.
Meanwhile, Enrique is building a small mountain of avocado rolls, applying a thin layer of vinegared rice to a sheet of seaweed, layering four thin strips of fresh avocado and one extremely long slice of salmon, and then rolling and pressing the finished product with surprising force. “There’s a squarish shape to them when they’re perfect,” Enrique says. After I ask Enrique how many avocado rolls he makes on a typical day, he looks to the ceiling for a moment. “Hundreds,” he says. “Many hundreds.”
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Los Angeles gave birth to America’s sushi obsession: The country’s first sushi restaurant, Kawafuko, opened in 1966 in Little Tokyo. Today, L.A. has one of the highest concentrations of master sushi chefs of cities located outside Japan. But amid this sea of sushi options, there is nothing quite like Yama. With three locations in L.A.—and a fourth coming soon—this small chain has built a name for itself filling a gap between prepackaged options that typically are anywhere from forgettable to decent and sit-down restaurants that range from decent to extraordinary. Yama, where one roll (six pieces) costs around $10, is the only one that does high-end fish in a high-volume grab-and-go model.
“We are one of the biggest buyers of fish in L.A.,” says Scott Kohno, co-owner of Yama. “People have told me that our fish is as good as Nobu, and I tell them it should be—because we are buying the same fish from the same suppliers.” To wit, every morning, each Yama location gets multiple deliveries of fresh fish that recently landed at LAX from Tokyo’s famed Toyosu Market.
The business was founded 42 years ago in the San Gabriel Valley by Kenzo Yamada, who previously had been a veteran seafood broker to some of L.A.’s most famed sushi restaurants. Yama, his busy little market in the city of San Gabriel, built a reputation for unparalleled quality without pretension. When Yamada retired in 2021, he sold the business to the Kohno family, who aspired to provide the same selective sourcing while scaling Yama with new markets in West L.A. and Koreatown. A fourth location, in Sherman Oaks, is set to open later this year.
Kohno’s daughter, Remi Ham, now runs the marketing side of the business. She was working on the sales team at TikTok before joining the family venture. Her mom (and Scott’s wife), Wendy Narumi Kohno, is a certified kikisake-shi, or sake sommelier. Thanks to her influence and expertise, the West L.A. market now sells what Ham says is the largest selection of premium sake in Los Angeles—some 200 varieties. (The Sherman Oaks location will be the first Yama location to receive a full liquor license. It plans to carry a wide selection of Japanese whiskeys.)
Before I get my all-access tour, Ham gives me a walking tour of the West L.A. market. It’s the size of a modest convenience store but artfully packed with a dizzying array of Japanese items. The company now has an office in Tokyo, where a small team curates new sauces and snacks and beverages to hit the shelves here in L.A. The store also has a hot-food section—with chicken katsu (“an update of my mom’s family recipe,” Ham says) and a Japanese curry, cooked by this location’s head chef, Kotaro Sunagawa, that contains a bit of apple for some acidity.
Chef Ko, as he’s known, came to Yama after spending 20 years as executive chef at L.A. sushi stalwarts like Hamasaku and Kodo. His rolls have quickly become signature rolls: I poll everyone in the store on their favorite item, and one of the most popular answers is Chef Ko’s lemon roll, a maki with two cuts of salmon, avocado, cucumber, seasoned rice, and razor-thin lemon slices. The California roll is another customer favorite. “When we talked to our customers, a lot of them said they never eat California rolls,” Kohno says. “But ours is different—bigger, creamier, made with an attention to detail that’s usually not there.” Fittingly, the Los Angeles Times has anointed Yama’s the “ultimate” California roll in L.A.
Yama is consistently included on lists of the city’s best sushi by the likes of Eater and the Infatuation, fêted alongside lavish omakase specialists and celebrity chefs and atmospheric neighborhood restaurants. “We try to stay focused on consistently delivering the quality that our customers expect and giving American consumers a window to Japan,” Kohno says.
On this particular afternoon, a hungry late-lunch crowd pours through that window. The front of the market operates with an orderly efficiency that obscures the sheer volume of people who grab a few items, pay, and then leave. Back in the kitchen area, I see a worksheet hanging on the wall that itemized part of the daily production goals—more than 1,000 rolls and hundreds of containers of nigiri. And that doesn’t include orders for freshly sliced sashimi or bento boxes or catering platters or katsu bowls. Kohno notes that things really hit a fever pitch during the predinner rush on Friday and Saturday. “We often have customers lined up outside because the market can only hold so many people.”
Despite the staggering volume of sushi, there’s an unmistakable vibe in the market, one similar to the feeling at a neighborhood wine shop or cheese purveyor or small ethnic grocer—that palpable sense that you are among friends. Ham says of Yama’s offerings of nigiri and sake classes, as well as events for local kids: “We take pride in making this a third space.”
The market has a large display dedicated to Tanabata, a summertime festival in Japanese culture that celebrates the annual meeting of two deities. There’s a small wishing tree set up near the register, where customers can write a wish on a colorful strip of paper and then hang it on one of the leaves. Ham hands me a small blue strip and I feel compelled to write a poetic request for the health and happiness of my family. But truth be told, I am yearning for a shade tree to sit beneath and eat my lemon roll.•
Peter Flax is a Los Angeles–based journalist. The author of the book Live to Ride, Flax was most recently the editor in chief at the Red Bulletin and the features editor at the Hollywood Reporter. He has lived in Los Angeles for 12 years without owning a car and has done more than 75,000 miles of commuting on his bicycle.
