Just two weeks ago, Mujō became one of five Atlanta restaurants to gain a coveted Michelin Guide star rating.
This is not Mujō Executive Chef and Partner J. Trent Harris’ first experience with the Michelin Guide. Before he opened the omakase restaurant, he started his sushi career in Columbus, Ohio. He later honed his skills in New York at restaurants like the Michelin star establishment Sushi Ginza Onodera, where he worked under master sushi chef Masaki Saito.
Mujō started as a sushi pop-up in 2020, but the brick-and-mortar opened just last year in 2022 under the Castellucci Hospitality Group, which also features the tapas restaurants Cooks & Soldiers, The Iberian Pig, and the Mediterranean restaurant Sugo.
Rough Draft spoke with Chef Harris about winning a Michelin star and his journey to Atlanta. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mujō just won a Michelin Star. How have you been feeling? How’s the week been to decompress?
J. Trent Harris: It feels good. You know, more than anything I’m just really proud of the team. I’m excited to see the recognition for the restaurant for all the work they put in. I think that’s the biggest thing. I just feel really proud of everybody involved with this project.
Moving backwards, I would love to hear a bit about how you got started as a sushi chef.
Harris: I actually grew up in Eastern Kentucky, finished high school in Northern Kentucky, and then moved to one of the closest, biggest cities around there, which was Columbus, Ohio. One of the closest places you could go. I started working there. I got an opportunity to train with a Japanese chef there, just because he needed an assistant and I was basically available, was my qualification. But I really enjoyed the cuisine and the work, and kind of kept pursuing it. I did that for a few years there and went to culinary school at some point and wanted to pursue more fine dining options. At that point in time, and in that area, there weren’t really options to do higher end sushi that were available. I went to New York, spent a couple of years in the Hamptons doing some private stuff at a private club. When I got to New York, I was working as the CdC (Chef de Cuisine) at a restaurant called Aldea, which was a one Michelin star Portuguese modern fine dining place – Portuguese influenced, it was really just kind of modern New York cooking. But doing that for a while just sort of made me really think about getting back into sushi and how much I missed doing that. So, I really refocused on doing sushi and working in some of the higher end sushi-yas in New York City. All in, I’ve been a chef for about 20 years, and I’d say maybe 12 years of that I’ve been doing sushi.
I know you trained in Tokyo. Could you talk a bit about your time there?
Harris: Well, I was working for a restaurant called Sushi Ginza Onodera in New York City. While I was there, we earned two Michelin stars. It was a small team. Chef Masaki Saito and then another chef named Kazushige Suzuki, who now has his own one Michelin star restaurant in New York called Icca. So, the three of us [were] really working on all the preparations together. After working for them for a couple of years, they wanted me to do a little bit of training in their main shop in Tokyo.
To be honest with you, I didn’t really see much of Tokyo. I just spent most of my time working, and it didn’t feel all that different than the restaurant in New York, to be honest. We were using the same ingredients, buying fish from the same brokers. Every service still ran in Japanese. The kitchen meeting was in Japanese, staff meal was the same. You know, that restaurant in New York really operated like a Japanese restaurant. So it was a great experience, but I didn’t feel – because of the care that Saito-san put into how that restaurant was run – it really didn’t feel that different than the kitchen in New York.
When did you move to Atlanta and why did you want to open Mujō?
Harris: I came down here in 2020 temporarily. My business partner Fred [Castellucci] still had his restaurants open here. He invited me to come down and do a takeout pop up. New York was still very much shut down, so I came down to do that temporarily and lived in a hotel for a few months. We had a really great response to that, with what we’re doing, and it was really well received by people here. [We were] doing that, sort of talking about what’s going to happen – how’s the restaurant industry going to be different – and kind of were betting on that Atlanta is going to recover and be a great dining city. It seemed like the right time to open something like this here, you know? The people were interested in it and ready for it to happen and excited about dining out again. So after being down here for five or six months and doing that, we started talking about opening something permanent and found a little space and did it on a very slim budget. Because at this point in time, when we’re building it out, we still don’t know … are we going to open this restaurant and have to do takeout? Or are we going to get shut down again? You know, so it was a lot of gamble on whether or not the city or the world would be ready for us when we opened. We’re very lucky that the timing was right, that people were ready to go out and dine again.
Mujō does Edomae sushi. Could you explain for readers what that is, and how Mujō puts its own spin on it?
Harris: Edomae sushi really refers to the old school, Tokyo-style sushi. The old name for Toyko is Edo, and there’s a whole period of time in Japan called the Edo period [1603-1868]. “Mae” means “in front of.” For example, a sushi chef is called “itamae,” which means “in front of the board.” You stand in front of the cutting board. So “edomae” literally means “in front of Toyko,” which is a way of saying Tokyo Bay.
So at that time, all of the ingredients for this style of sushi were coming from Tokyo Bay. Being that there was no refrigeration, a lot of these techniques were developed to preserve. So a lot of the things we do – salting and curing with vinegar, or simmering some items, aging some things – are really similar to buying dill pickles at the grocery store. You don’t need to do that to preserve cucumbers. We have refrigerators. But we like the taste of it. It’s all about the flavor of those things and those techniques.
Edomae sushi, really these days, is about using the best possible ingredients that you can get and trying to bring out the natural flavors and the umami of those ingredients. Both using primarily fish from Japan – which we do, it’s probably 90% from Japan – but as well as domestic things. You know, applying those techniques to some of those domestic products that we can get in good enough quality to use. Then, it really focuses on what’s called nigiri sushi. In Japanese, “niguru” means “to grip.” So nigiri sushi is a grip sushi. So that’s sushi that’s formed in your hand, right? This started out as basically street food in Japan, and the nigiri, they used to be much bigger. It was something you could pick up from a cart on your way home to eat, and didn’t really sort of evolve into what we see now until after World War II when real estate became much cheaper in Tokyo, and a lot of these shops were able to move indoors. And then because of the rationing of rice, the size of the nigiri got smaller as well, post World War II. You also see the addition of ingredients that we now consider staples, like uni and fatty tuna and those things – even salmon, which is not a traditional ingredient for Edomae-style sushi. That’s something that wasn’t popular until the 1970s. And uni, in the Edo period, was not used for sushi because you couldn’t get it fresh enough to get it to Tokyo when it came out of the water. That’s something that didn’t really appear until post-World War II in Edomae-style sushi.
Wow, a crash course in the history of sushi. Thank you. I know the menu changes sometimes. How often does that happen?
Harris: I’d say for most people, you know, if you come to Mujō and then you come a month later, the menu is pretty much completely different. There are a few things that will make appearances, like we try to always have tuna available on the menu. If we’re making sushi, there are some other things that are going to be staples. We have a caviar service as a supplement that we do. We make shokupan, Japanese milk bread. Some of those things are sort of always on the menu. But then everything else is really based on what products we’re getting. So as far as how often we change the menu, it’s kind of up to a farmer that we work with, or up to some of the fishermen. We were getting eggplant for a while from a local farmer. We were getting really good eggplant for three weeks, so we used it for three weeks. Other things he might bring us, we only get it for a week, so we use it for a week. So really we’re changing the menu based on that. If he comes to us with Hakurei turnips, then we use those for however long he has them in good supply and good quality.
It’s sort of the same with fish. We’re in communication constantly with our brokers in Japan. The way Japanese fishmongers work – there’s a centralized market, your broker goes and bids on your behalf and purchases on your behalf, as opposed to fish purveyors here, who purchase in large quantities and then call you up and say, hey I have this, I have this, I have this. Do you want to buy some salmon, do you want to buy some red snapper? In Japan, they don’t actually hold any inventory, generally. You work with a broker. I tell him what I’m looking for, he goes to the market and then goes to all those individual fishmongers and purchases from them, trying to get the best quality. He’s bidding on uni for us at auction, bidding on tuna for us at auction, or he’s purchasing from a vendor in Toyosu Market [a fish market in Tokyo] who specifically only sells tuna. We’ll give him a list of what we’re looking for. He’ll go to the market. Some of those things we’re asking for are based on what’s historically in season, or just ingredients that we have a preference to work with at that point in time. But then he’ll come back to us and you know, some days [it’s] hey, the weather wasn’t great, this fish is not available. Do you want something else? Or maybe you didn’t ask for this, but I saw it and it looks really good. Do you want me to send this? That’s kind of how we choose the sushi progression, based on that conversation with the broker based on what’s available in the market and what the fishermen are bringing in. So it’s a little bit up to us, but really it’s the fishermen and the farmers who decide what our menu is, as far as what ingredients we use.
