In Romi Trower’s native Australia, hand rolls are everywhere. There are strip mall hand rolls, major chain brand hand rolls, hand roll kiosks, and boutique restaurants that sell uncut nori rolls stuffed with tuna or fried chicken or raw salmon. The food
is “so unbelievably popular,” Trower says, that it’s not far-fetched to see one-year-olds in strollers gnawing on a cooked tuna roll, or moms picking up boxes of rolls for a family dinner, or a lunchtime bite. “It’s as common as getting a sandwich or a salad for lunch,” Trower says.
Although Trower is a filmmaker by trade, she’s been on a two-year journey to open a restaurant, driven by deep longing for Australian-style hand rolls (and some encouragement from her husband). The journey culminates with the debut of Handroll Hawker inRussian Hill on Tuesday, September 29.
It’s not that San Francisco is devoid of sushi or hand rolls. In fact, quite the opposite. As Trower sees it, though, the sushi here is either a more refined experience — a lunch or dinner with maybe a glass of wine — or takeout or grocery store sushi. But even the casual versions are sliced and typically require chopsticks and a place to sit down and eat. “There’s something about the ease of the uncut roll that literally fits in your hand where you can honestly push the stroller with one hand and eat the roll in the other,” Trower says. “It’s not messy. It’s not like chopsticks with bits of fish falling out; they’re really compact, and they’re really just super, super portable.”
The Australian version is typically pre-prepared and stored in a patisserie-style fridge, meaning cold rice and nori that’s generally soft, not crispy. The format keeps Trower’s favorite hand rolls portable — the hand rolls don’t come apart this way — and allows for fast pickup for lunch or dinner.
In Trower’s quest to translate her favorite rolls stateside into a restaurant, she and her husband worked with David Steele at Flour + Water Hospitality Group as consultants. Trower even took the extra step of going to a culinary school in Tokyo to learn about making sushi rice and traditional rolls. Trower’s training gave her a base knowledge to communicate with chef Tai Trinh, formerly of omakase restaurant Robin, and who is now running the kitchen at Handroll Hawker, about what she was looking for in an Australian hand roll. Trower took extensive notes in a notebook, and when Trinh came on board, “It was very easy for him to follow that,” Trower says. “He has done such complex and sophisticated things at Robin that [it] was no issue, but it gave us an amazing baseline to then be able to tweak it the way we wanted to tweak it, and for Tai to have his input on how we could improve it, add twists, add flair, make the rice more interesting, all that sort of stuff.”
The duo created a menu of hand rolls that should speak to both Australians and San Franciscans, such as by using the more traditional red vinegar rather than the white vinegar typically used in Australian rolls, and incorporating yuzu into the restaurant’s spicy mayonnaise.
The shop is geared towards takeout with just a few tables inside to sit and eat. The opening menu features nine rolls to choose from. The fish used is typically not chopped, as it sometimes is in hand rolls; instead, a whole slice of fish is used throughout. Two rolls feature fried items — crispy chicken or shrimp tempura — with lettuce and house mayo wrapped in nori. Spicy options include salmon or tuna with cucumber and the aforementioned spicy yuzu mayo. There is also a salmon-avocado hand roll; one featuring cooked shrimp with avocado, cucumber, and sesame seeds; and two vegan options — one featuring inari tofu with pickled daikon radish, avocado, and cucumber, and a cucumber-avocado roll. Lastly, there’s a cooked tuna roll with cucumber and mayo, which Trower calls “the Australian classic.”
There isn’t much beyond that, besides a miso soup that Trinh made vegan, topped with wakame and tofu (miso soup is typically made with bonito). For drinks, there are some canned sodas and sparkling water, as well as Trinh’s yuzu lemonade. The restaurant itself is an explosion of pink and teal, with artwork by Serge Gay Jr. It was all designed by Trower, with inspiration from Trower’s time in Tokyo and Melbourne’s laneways, and now the restaurant is finally ready to open.
“Having the kitchen line cooks come in, having the assistant shop manager coming in, having cashiers and starting to train them, for me, it feels like the end of pre-production on the film,” Trower says. “Finally it’s filling up, and there’s other people bringing their skills, and it’s quite obviously nerve-wracking in some ways, but also so joyous that after so many years of building, you finally brought the team together and you are so close to actually doing it.”
Handroll Hawker (2360 Polk Street, San Francisco) debuts on Tuesday, September 29, and is open from 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., seven days a week.
