What’s in a nationality?

Walk into most restaurants serving sushi in Lebanon and you will almost certainly not see a local rolling up your makis. Though the majority of sushi chefs in Lebanon hail from the Philippines, Vietnam or Thailand, there are two or three restaurants that boast Japanese chefs preparing your Japanese meal. Restaurant owners Executive spoke to all agreed that hiring a Japanese chef for their sushi restaurant is simply too expensive. “In Lebanon, the salary of a non-Japanese chef is around $1,000. If I hire a Japanese chef, whose salary is much higher, how can I compete with the restaurants around me who don’t have Japanese chefs and pay them much less, given that our other expenses are the same? It’s just not cost effective for us,” explains Shogun owner Aref Saade, adding that a Japanese chef would likely find it hard to deal with the way Lebanese eat their sushi