When Yuta Katsuyama landed at the Illinois Institute of Technology four semesters ago, in the very real food desert of Bronzeville, he couldn’t find anything to eat.
For overworked professionals such as Katsuyama, who was a management consultant in the food tech industry, their absence would be unthinkable. “Onigiri is really handy,” he says. “You can eat with just one hand. You can eat while working.” Besides that, they’re tightly knit into the emotional fabric of the nation. Katsuyama’s mom, like everybody else’s, made them for him when he was a kid. “This is kind of stupid,” he says (laughing). But “when I was an undergrad student I had a girlfriend, and when I have time, I always make onigiri for her.”
He designed menu cards decorated with Edo-period woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai, and chose biodegradable packaging, with each onigiri separated by wax paper, a neatly ordered row of them wrapped in bamboo skin. COVID-related licensing delays set him back a few weeks, but by July 19 he was taking orders on his website and posting weekly pickup schedules in different neighborhoods on Instagram, nimbly switching locations in the shuttle, a silver hybrid Chevy Volt, according to demand or lack of it.
And it’s flexible enough for him to test his bespoke onigiri idea. “Onigiri is just the rice, so it can be Chinese onigiri or Indian onigiri or Mexican onigiri, right? If we can collect the data of people’s preferences and create customized onigiri, for customers it will be fun. But that’s just imagination.” v
onigirikororin.com Pop-up runs through Sunday, August 23
