Meet the chef: Stephen Wong, chef/owner of Rice restaurant in Dover

Q: You’re family came to the United States from Hong Kong in 1989, how did you find yourself in Dover?
A: We used to have a restaurant in New York City, but the landlord decided to sell the land to build high-rise. My wife grew up here, in Bear, and her father lives in Seaford. So we decided to come here to be close to her father and we’ve been open a year and a half now.

Q: Why did you think Dover would be a good place for a sushi restaurant?
A: It’s a city. I looked at the area around here and there’s a lot of development. Every town, every city has the potential for a sushi restaurant. I would call it a healthier food. And Dover has the population that wants to try it. The trend in society now is people tend to eat more healthy — less oil, less cornstarch. Even with our Chinese food, we cook pretty differently from other Chinese restaurants.

Q: There aren’t many sushi restaurants around here, have you been successful in exposing people to new types of food?
A: When you talk about Japanese food, you might think Wilmington, city life, upscale. But my philosophy is I want to bring this food, this style in a more affordable way. If you go to a Japanese restaurant in Wilmington, you spend $5 or $6 for a piece of sushi, but here we go down to $2 or $3 with the same quality you’d get in those restaurants. I want people to give it a try, then come back and try something else. It’s affordable, so if you try something and you don’t like it, you can try it one more time.

Q: Where do you get your seafood?
A: You don’t need very expensive ingredients, but it has to be fresh and it has to be good. We get it from different sources — Philly, Maryland and sometimes from New York. They have some unique stuff, some stuff you can’t get here. I try to bring things back when I have time to go to New York. We get seafood in three times a week. On Friday morning we get a load of fish, so Friday night is a great night to come. But we tend to use the fish within one or two days. You need to use fish very fast, and I don’t freeze it because that’s not the way to make sushi.

Q: How did you learn to make sushi and Chinese food?
A: I’m a designer and I used to work in a firm in New York City in an area that had a lot of Japanese restaurants. Those people tended to go out to business meetings for sushi. And my father and mother, mother-in-law and father-in-law have always been in the restaurant business. My uncle used to own a Chinese restaurant and I learned the Chinese style from him. And I went to culinary school in New York, it wasn’t necessarily Japanese but I learned a lot. Culinary school was more technique, but I learned how to create these dishes in my friend’s restaurants. Many of them have been cooking for more then 10 years now, most of them are master chefs with restaurants in NYC.

Q: What’s the most important part of making sushi?
A: To me, it’s how you cut the fish. It’s just like meat, there is lean and there is tendon. If you cut it the wrong way, it destroys the fish. You may not notice when you get it, but if it’s cut the wrong way, instead of biting it you have to tear it. You have to be clean when you cut fish, your board always needs to be clean. And freshness is always important.

Q: What’s your favorite kind of sushi, maki rolls or the more traditional Edo-style sushi with only fish and rice?
A: I like fish more than I like the rolls. The rolls are more American style, they add beef for example, and you’d never see that in Japan, or they do it hibachi style, or some other way. If you want to taste the freshness, get a really fresh taste, you have the Edo style.

Q: What’s your favorite kind of fish?
A: I like salmon. Salmon is very popular and it’s very easy for people to accept. I also like yellow tail, but it has a very strong taste and the first time people get it they think there’s something wrong just because it’s so strong. But once you start loving sushi, you get into yellow tail, as well as salmon and tuna. If you are really looking for exotic stuff, you want to sit at the sushi bar and ask for something special from the chef. It’s almost an art form.

Q: What’s your house specialty?
A: We do some very good tuna, so our special roll has spicy tuna, which gives a lot of flavor, and on top of that we add shrimp tempura. It’s half raw and half cooked. And the rice, well that’s why we call our restaurant Rice. We use a very different sushi rice here. We have 10 kinds of rice, brown rice from California, sushi rice from Japan. The reason I named this restaurant Rice is because for Chinese food, Japanese food and almost all Asian food, rice is very important.

Rice Restaurant • Greentree Village Shopping Center, Dover • 678-1328
Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. • Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Sunday, Noon to 10 p.m.