The Philadelphia Sushi Roll Is A Fusion Food With This Unique Touch

There are certain American cities you associate with sushi. You can get just about anything in New York, of course — including at two of Martha Stewart's favorite sushi restaurants — and both Los Angeles and San Francisco were well ahead of the curve when it came to this delicious dish, even before it became something you can not only enjoy but also trust in a small town. But while Philadelphia isn't known as a powerhouse of Asian cuisine, it has its own satisfying roll — made with lox and cream cheese — invented by a sushi master who calls the City of Brotherly Love her home.

A Philadelphia roll is rather appropriately named, as it makes use of an ingredient you won't find very often in Japanese cuisine: cream cheese. (It doesn't have to be Philadelphia cream cheese, which goes great with walnuts on a sandwich, specifically, but it couldn't hurt.) In addition to the cream cheese, it contains smoked salmon, or lox, as well as cucumber. While it's true that it's very much made for American consumption, similar to other kinds of sushi rolls including California and dragon rolls, that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it?

The more cynical among you might think that the Philadelphia roll is a commercialized, Americanized product intended to make sushi more approachable by offering something inauthentic, yet familiar to an unsophisticated palate. But the Philly roll was actually invented by a real-deal master of sushi: Ai Saito, usually referred to as Madame Saito, but also known as "the Queen of Sushi" in her adopted home of Philadelphia.

Her most famous invention came about after she enjoyed a lox and cream cheese bagel at a Jewish family's house. An idea struck, and by combining smoked salmon, cucumber, cream cheese, and rice vinegar wrapped in nori, or sheets of seaweed, Saito developed the creamy roll that's now eaten in restaurants all across the country.

Saito was born in Kobe, Japan before studying cooking across the globe, including at prestigious academies in Paris. After opening a restaurant in Japan in the 1970s, Saito moved with her family to Philadelphia, in hopes that her three sons might attend the University of Pennsylvania. (All three ended up attending, and all three are successful, albeit not in the restaurant business.) She opened her first Philadelphia restaurant in 1981, and eventually created a mini-culinary empire. If anyone deserves to call herself the Queen of Sushi, it's undoubtedly her.