State-Journal.com - Roll with it

Featured Video:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Xiuna Lin makes mostly California rolls, cream cheese rolls and grilled salmon.

Xiuna rolls sticky rice on a sheet of seaweed in a bamboo mat before cutting the sushi into pieces.

Photo By Hilly SchifferXiuna Lin rolls sushi behind a deli counter at Kroger East. Since opening the sushi bar last April, Xiuna said she makes about 2,000 pieces of sushi a week.

Xiuna Lin rolls sushi seven days a week.

Standing behind a deli counter at Kroger East, she spreads sticky rice on sheets of seaweed, rolls it up tight in a bamboo mat, and slices it with a knife so fast it’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it.

A native of southern China, Xiuna (pronounced Shu-na) opened her sushi bar last April. She says she doesn’t mind trading her days off for eight hours on her feet – she likes working with the customers she calls her friends.

“This is a first for me, and this is a first for Frankfort, so I just want to build up my customers, and I want to make my business better and better,” she said.

“The customers are like my friends. They come back, and I already know what they want.”

Xiuna started her culinary career in Japan, where she worked for a year in a sushi restaurant. She moved to the U.S. six years ago with her husband, Shuiqin Wu, and their daughters, Rosie and Cyndi, now 13 and 8.

Landing in the Detroit airport, Xiuna was in for a shock – media images of America hadn’t prepared her for a terminal full of bulging waistlines.

“In China when I watched TV, it’s all American movies and the ladies are tall and skinny and pretty,” she said, laughing.

“I landed, and I saw the people, and I was like, ‘No, it’s not right!”

Maybe sushi could give Americans an alternative to fried food, she hoped.

“I thought, maybe people want to change and eat a different way. America has too many people overweight. Sushi is a healthy food, and maybe people want to try it to diet.”

She got a job making sushi at the Good Foods Co-Op in Lexington, and last year she signed on with AFC Corp., a company that franchises sushi bars in supermarkets.

Since then, she’s made about 2,000 pieces of sushi a week, mostly California rolls, cream cheese rolls and grilled salmon.

Xiuna wants to get the word out that sushi isn’t just raw fish – it’s vinegar with rice. Some sushi incorporates raw fish, but other items are made with cooked seafood or vegetables.

“I still think a lot of people don’t want it because of the raw fish. They don’t understand. They don’t know what it is.”

She hung a sign in front of her prep area to let customers know the truth about sushi, and she often makes free samples for first timers.

She’s also started offering more cooked food rolled into sushi because it sells better in the states, especially Kentucky, where seafood isn’t prominent.

“I lived in southern China, so I ate seafood every day. It’s very good, and it’s good for you and healthy.”

Still, it could take a long time to train American taste buds to choose sushi rolls over French fries. Many of Xiuna’s customers are intimidated at first, she says, playing it safe with California rolls instead of eel or spicy shrimp.

Once they get comfortable, they start to order variations – small first, like asking for brown rice instead of white. Xiuna says she’s willing to make whatever her customers want.

She only keeps prepared sushi one day, tossing out leftovers every morning. She even warns her customers about stashing it in the fridge to eat later – the rice can get hard, she says, and the flavor of the ingredients can change.

“I want to keep my quality. I don’t want people to say my sushi is not good.”

She also cooks traditional Chinese food every night for her family, a task that sometimes takes two hours.

“They say, ‘Do you enjoy cooking?’ and I just say no,” she said, laughing. “But I do it, because we have to. We have to eat!”

Part of the reason it takes so long is that Xiuna likes to cook food that doesn’t just taste good – she wants it to look good too. She pairs green and red vegetables for added color, for example.

That artistic inclination carries over to her work too.

She made snowmen out of sushi once, building a body from white rice, and decorating it with red salmon, yellow tuna and green avocado.

“I want to do it more, but it kind of takes time. It’s hard to decorate it, so sometimes when I’m busy, I just cannot do it.”

Xiuna lives in Lexington with her daughters. Her husband moved to San Diego in December, leaving his position as an agricultural researcher at the University of Kentucky for a new job.

She says it’s hard to be apart, but she wants to keep her sushi business open a while longer.

She’s not ready to leave her friends yet, either.

Xiuna has grown close to her customers – she gets emotional talking about the ones who have been diagnosed with cancer or lost their jobs.

When she hears sad stories like that, she knows what to do: Roll up an order of their favorite sushi and serve it with a hug.

“The most important thing to me is the service. The food you can buy anywhere, but the service will bring them back.”

“Frankfort Faces” is a series that highlights people from within the Frankfort and Franklin County community. Each feature follows one of the city’s most unique personalities and includes a story, photos and video, which can be found by clicking the TV icon attached to the story online at state-journal.com.