Story by Leah Shapiro | Photos by Paul M. Howey
When I asked Joe Chen where he learned to cook, he replied, “My mom cooked, but everybody knows how to cook in China. We didn’t usually go out to eat. There was a lot of cooking in the home.”
Growing up in Fuzhou, China, Joe learned how to create traditional Chinese dishes. In 2002, at age 20, he moved to New York City and began working at a Japanese restaurant in Chinatown. It was there that he met Qin Chen, who had also moved there from Fuzhou a year earlier. The two fell in love and were married in 2004.
Qin has always enjoyed working in the front of house, while Joe has fun acquiring even more skills in the kitchen. For several years in New York, he performed as a hibachi chef. (He’s still got the skills even though he hasn’t practiced in a little while. He showed us some fancy knife tosses.) Joe says he worked in about 50 Asian restaurants in the northeast, gaining more knowledge with each transition. At one restaurant in New Jersey, he learned how to cook Thai food from a fellow chef. Joe found himself working constantly and never getting a vacation. “I compared the sauces and which sauce was better,” he says. “At every restaurant, I learned something.”
In February of 2011, their daughter Celia was born. The couple decided they were ready to own their own restaurant. From a Chinatown newspaper, they saw that an Asian restaurant in Asheville was for sale. By February of 2012, they had purchased the restaurant in Gerber Village and moved to Asheville. After a few months, they renamed it Sogo Fusion.
Joe and Qin decided they wanted to take their restaurant in a different, more “Asheville” direction and closed Sogo Fusion last summer. In January, they opened Asheville Sushi & Hibachi, also in South Asheville. Open every day for lunch and dinner, the restaurant is the first sushi restaurant in Asheville to offer many options that are local, organic, and wild caught. They wanted the menu to better reflect what their customers were craving.
Pork and beef are locally sourced from Hickory Nut Gap Farm and the vegetables are organic from Mountain Food Products. Tuna and shrimp are wild caught and the chicken is antibiotic free.
The menu continues to offer a range of Asian dishes, highlighting Joe’s extensive culinary background in Japanese and Thai cuisine. In fact, the only Chinese dish is customer favorite General Tso’s Chicken. The sushi selection is huge. Their cousin Tony Lin is the sushi chef and every roll is a work of art. Perhaps try a local beer or glass of sake with your meal.
Among the many lunch specials is a bento box that offers your choice of dumpling, maki roll, and entrée, such as chicken teriyaki or shrimp katsu, among others. There are half a dozen noodle dishes, including pad Thai, yaki udon, and sukiyaki.
In the mood for fried rice? There are many kinds to choose from, such as tofu Friday rice and the house special fried rice.
“Our favorite part of owning a restaurant is serving the customers,” says Joe. “People are very nice in Asheville. That’s why we chose Asheville.”
Asheville Sushi & Hibachi is located at 1636 Hendersonville Road, Suite 175, in South Asheville. For more information, visit ashevillesushiandhibachi.com or call 828.277.3838.
