Chika Kuramoto only gets two or three hours of sleep a night, she says. She leaves her home in South San Francisco by 2 or 3 a.m. to head for the kitchen of her Sunset storefront, CSK Kitchen, where she puts on an apron with a picture of three dogs on it and begins the day’s work, fueled only by a cup of coffee.
Kuramoto, 62, has plenty on her plate. In addition to owning Sakura, a Japanese grocery store at 936 Irving St., she runs a busy catering business on the weekends.
Most recently, Kuramoto opened CSK Kitchen at 420 Judah St. on June 6. It’s open six days a week and, like Sakura, sells the Japanese grab-and-go food that Kuramoto and her staff begin assembling at the crack of dawn, like onigiri and bento boxes.
Kuramoto has cooked her whole life, learning from her mom and grandmother along the way. When she was growing up in Japan, Kuramoto said, her mom made everything from scratch, with the sole exception of French fries, which she bought frozen.
“I still feel like I need to get permission to use frozen food,” Kuramoto said.
But cooking hasn’t always been a career. Kuramoto’s first job was in a bank in Tokyo. That’s where she met her husband, who worked for the same company in the U.S. The two suspected (correctly) that Japan’s buoyant 1980s economy was actually a bubble that was about to burst, and decided to move to San Francisco, his birthplace, in 1990.
San Francisco’s hills and ocean reminded her of Kobe in Japan, she said — but with more fog. When she first arrived, Kuramoto tackled English with the single-minded concentration she now applies to cooking. Her banker’s English wasn’t enough, so she tuned in to CNN every morning. As the day wore on, she’d switch to sitcoms.
“My goal was, if I can understand their jokes and laugh, I’m okay,” Kuramoto said.
After a few months, Kuramoto got the jokes and stopped watching sitcoms.
She had to adjust to the norms of school vacations in the United States, with students out for the whole summer instead of just late July through the end of August. Kuramoto decided she had to shift careers and became a preschool teacher in 1998, a job that allowed her to spend more time with her children.
The new schedule gave her more time for cooking at home. At first, it was hard to find authentic ingredients to cook with. She would smuggle shiitake mushrooms in her luggage on her way back from Japan. Soon, she was feeding her children’s friends as well as her own family.
“They’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is much better than a restaurant,” Kuramoto said.
Another culture shock: The Japanese restaurants in San Francisco were fine, she thought, but not what she was accustomed to. For one thing, she said American tempura had too much batter.
“The tempura is not that way,” Kuramoto said firmly. “You need to have taste,” she said. “You need to feel the ingredient.”
Kuramoto’s kids grew up. In 2018, her husband died, and she stopped teaching. Soon after the pandemic, she started catering for businesses and events.
“I really want you guys to taste like real, authentic Japanese,” she remembers thinking. “The way we cook, the way we use the ingredients; it’s why I started this job.”
In 2022, she bought Sakura, a Japanese convenience store, from its owners, who were retiring, and began selling her food there.
Kuramoto hired friends — and friends of friends — to help her scale up from home cooking to catering. Many of them were Japanese, and she invited staff to advise her on what dishes to make next: A new Japanese-style sandwich with soft bread? A bento box? She tries to keep the kitchen calm, she said. Food tastes bad if everyone is yelling.
Before her husband died, Kuramoto said he received excellent care at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center on Parnassus. Now, at CSK, she feeds UCSF staff daily.
“Isn’t that good? It’s like circling everything,” Kuramoto said. “They help me so much, and now, I’m helping them just a little.”
Knowing how busy she is, her kids always check in with her, Kuramoto says: “Mom, are you sleeping? Mom, are you drinking? Mom, are you eating?” She might not be able to say yes to all the questions, she says, but she always stays through the day, and gets ready to do it all again.
