It’s the finer things in life, like Durban summers and neo soul, that bring a smile to Vusi Kunene’s face, but nothing brings him as much joy as sushi and a good bottle of white wine. But life hasn’t always been a breeze for the 30-year-old entrepreneur.
Kunene grew up in the small town of Topfontein, in the province of Mpumalanga, but always wanted more from life. At the age of 15, he dropped out of high school and set his sights on making it big in Johannesburg.
But life in the City of Gold was tough.
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“I started doing all these odd jobs. I used to be a car guard, I’ve done construction and I’ve taken pictures at some stage in my life,” he says.
But it was working as a waiter in the hospitality industry that introduced him to the mouth-watering opportunities of food. Six years of eyeing the cooking process from afar, Kunene decided to put on the white hat and try his hand as a chef. He had ambitions to travel around the world and learn how to prepare different cuisines. It was, however, in Cape Town where he fell in love with sushi.
“If you look at the chefs behind the counter, you’ll see they are very passionate. The communication between the chef, his knife and whatever he’s doing is amazing. For them it’s not even work, it’s a lifestyle,” says Kunene.
His biggest challenge was the language barrier between him and the Japanese and Chinese chefs. So he learned everything he could about the process, history and culture through books.
After two years in Cape Town, Kunene moved back to Johannesburg where he began to work on his dream of opening his own sushi bar.
“Being a black man and saying you’re going to do sushi, people look at it and think it’s impossible. But what they were missing was [the vision to see] the opportunity in
the market.”
Kunene started small: two cutting boards, two knives and around $360. He called it The Mobile Sushi Bar.
“This showed me that an idea can be put into action with the minimum capital that you have, you don’t need a lot of money and a big sponsor,” he says.
Business quickly picked up and The Mobile Sushi Bar was making money from markets, home functions, corporate functions and food festivals.
While catering at The Africa Bike Week event, Kunene had a conversation with a customer that sparked the new name for
the business.
“Jokingly, he asked ‘which part of Japan are you from?’ and I said ‘No, we’re not the Japanese, we’re the Blackanese.’”
The name became a running joke throughout the event. It was edgy, fresh and perfectly represented the company.
Kunene decided it was time to open a sushi restaurant and the only certainty was that it would be called The Blackanese.
He found the perfect spot in the middle of the Maboneng Precinct – an urban neighborhood in downtown Johannesburg surrounded by art galleries, shops and studios.
The Blackanese opened their doors in April 2013. The first month drew in large crowds and it was clear that they were the popular new kids on the block. Kunene’s face was appearing on television shows, magazines and adverts.
But the honeymoon phase was short lived.
“Two months in and business just went dead… We were lucky to have two clients in a week.”
Uncertain of the future, Kunene fought on. He had seen too many businesses shut down during hard times, but he believed that things would soon turn around. They did.
A few months later, The Blackanese was soon back on its feet and doing better than ever. In June, the restaurant began renovations and reopened their doors in September.
Kunene sees big plans for the future of The Blackanese, including opening up a pop-up store in Japan.
Whenever inspiration is lacking and Kunene needs a little pat on the shoulder, he never has to go far. He literally walks a few steps to his apartment building, where he lives on the top floor. The view from his window says it all. Spray-painted on the face-bricked building across from him, in bold black words, it reads ‘I Love Your Work’. Surely a message from the universe.

Uncooked Fish  And Raw Ambition

Sushi, the Japanese culinary export of note, has endured several incarnations since finding its way to the Johannesburg sprawl over two decades ago. But it didn’t really go mainstream until the start of the noughties, just under a decade after the country’s first democratic elections and hot on the heels of the Y2K scare. It was the cuisine of the millennium in South Africa, the poshest thing you could go out and order. It was food for the monied, then. But not anymore.
The sushi was good back then, righteously prepared and well worth its billing, says Andrea Burgener, a food journalist and restaurateur.
“The first time a piece of sushi wandered into my mouth&#8230;I was seated at the sushi bar of&#8230;Ohsho, a fine upstanding restaurant armed with the sort of sushi chefs you’re scared of.”
Ohsho, which opened its doors in the late 80s, no longer exists but it introduced the tastebuds of the city to its charms and its price tag. “Ohsho&#8230;[was] Johannesburg’s introduction to sushi; a formal introduction, with no sushi merry-go-rounds or California rolls. Very pricey. Very good. I spent every penny I had going there,” says Burgner.
But Johannesburg is a particularly fickle city, at least when it comes to sushi. After Ohsho and Daruma, the other sushi institution in town, faded into culinary purgatory, a new sushi convention followed – cheaper, mass produced, on-the-go sushi. What followed was a terrifying trend that Burgener christened as the age of ‘McSushi’.
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“The Japanese chefs [at Ohsho or Daruma] would have thrown themselves upon their sashimi knives at the idea of putting cream-cheese and strawberries anywhere near a piece of sushi.”
But as the sushi trend continues to grow in Johannesburg, fusion has become the de facto status quo. Enter Vusi Kunene, proprietor of the city’s The Blackanese Sushi Bar in Maboneng. Kunene; not to be confused with the notorious Kenny ‘Sushi King’ Kunene infamous for eating sushi off of barely-clad models at his 40th birthday party a few years back, found his way to sushi while on a break from Jozi. Working in Cape Town, the former waiter found a passion in sushi. In the mid-2000s, returning to Johannesburg, Kunene decided to hedge his bets on a sushi operation. He teamed with other burgeoning sushi chefs in the city. Together they experimented at food fairs and held sushi classes across the city, eventually opening a restaurant two years ago.
Today, he’s the talk of the town, sushi and Kunene are almost synonymous. As the name suggests, there are no sushi purists at The Blackanese. But Kunene understands the sophistaction of Japanese sushi convention, although avocados and strawberries feature heavily in his creations. Kunene hopes to do something big with his sushi brand. But, for now, he’s happy with its success and all its perks. “I love the satisfaction of changing people’s lives through food,” he says.
The golden days are gone but the sushi apocalypse, imagined by Burgener as “curried sushi in a Tex-Mex wrap from a vending machine [or] free sushi enclosed with your favorite magazine”, is far from fruition. Hopefully, sushi innovators like Kunene will keep that reality at bay for a little while longer.

Tag: Sushi

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