This chef has sure hand with a sushi knife
SAUGUS - Look past the nail shop and a bakery in a strip mall on Route 1 here, and there is a surprising gem called Okasan Sushi. The chef and his magical hands make this restaurant worth seeking out.
Aung "Aaron" Myint Tun slices and rolls pieces of tuna with the delicate precision of a surgeon. He is curiously gentle with the tender vegetable spring rolls, packed with cucumber, carrot, and avocado, and drizzled with a peanut sauce. Tun, in fact, trained as a physician in his native Myanmar, also known as Burma. But his medical career never came to fruition because the 39-year-old doctor fled his country more than a decade ago.
During Tun's medical studies, his leadership and participation in student demonstrations against the military regime landed him in jail twice, for several months at a time. Living in a small cement cell, he says, sleeping on a bamboo mat, he would exist on two meals a day of soup, rice, and fish paste. But he managed to complete his education.
Today, Okasan Sushi is thousands of miles from his past life. But as he watches his country struggle to recover from a devastating cyclone, his painful memories seem all too vivid. "I feel very angry," he says, "and I feel helpless.
"They don't care about anything other than to hold on to power," says Tun about the military regime. "Although the government says they are helping the people, I know they are not." He keeps tabs on family and friends through a Southeast Asian network here. They're the same people who helped him gain a foothold in the restaurant business when he first came to this country. He worked with several other Burmese immigrants who owned sushi shops.
After operating several sushi franchises, he perfected his sushi repertoire at the Wild Oats in Saugus, acquiring a steady following until the market closed. Confident that he had enough customers to support a restaurant, Tun opened Okasan Sushi less than a mile away. The 20-seat spot is light and airy, the walls pale yellow.
He and his cousin, co-owner Kevin Tun (also a native of Burma and a chemist by training), offer lobster inari, a fried soy bean pouch stuffed with the shellfish, avocado, and cucumber slices, and topped with a sweet sauce. It is one of the many treats the cousins encourage their customers to sample. Other times, they will hand out tiny complementary plates of edamame, the popular steamed soy beans, or a spicy salad of cucumber and tomatoes.
"If you don't try, you don't have a chance to know what you like or not," Aaron Tun says. He thinks this is an added bonus of owning his own place. "When people come to us, we want them to be satisfied. At the grocery store, we could never do customer service."
Okasan Sushi has been opened since April and already the tasting strategy is working to gain a following. One loyal customer is Luciano Pakevicius, who passes by his house in Everett to make the trek up Route 1 - not just for the sushi, but for the welcome. "They treat you like a king when you come in," says Pakevicius, who is accompanied by his friend and new sushi recruit Joao Euqueres. "We just sit in the chair, and they begin shooting us different samples. Here, you are guided to try new things." Tun says he wants to make sushi accessible. "I put pictures on the menu to help people decide what to get," he says. For novices, the back of the menu features a glossary.
Tun explains the origin of the restaurant name. "Okasan means 'mother' in Burmese," he says. "We love our mothers, so it is to pay respect to them." He seems to offer the same respect for his customers. When he thinks about his life at home, and his former passion for medicine, he says he's still providing a good service - in a different way. "Basically, it is in our heart to make people healthy and happy."
You might say that a dose of good sushi is just what the doctor ordered.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, the name Luciano Paskevicius was misspelled in a story about Okasan Sushi, a Saugus restaurant, in the June 4 Food & Arts section. 