There’s no shortage of handrolls in the Bay Area.
Most sushi-centric Japanese spots prepare them in temaki form, cones of crisp nori overstuffed with fish, seafood, vegetables, and seasoned rice. Some, like Cow Hollow’s new Kaiyo Handroll Bar or chef Kyle Itani’s Yonsei Handrolls in Oakland have a more taco-like presentation, with ingredients layered on sheets of pliable nori that lift out of their serving cradles like tortillas.
Shrimp tempura roll at Handroll Hawker(Kristen Loken)
But up until a few weeks ago, nowhere in San Francisco—nowhere in the entire Bay Area—served them Aussie-style: as highly portable cylinders tightly swaddled in soft nori.
It was one of the things Romi Trower, owner of Polk Street’s new Handroll Hawker, missed most about home when she and her husband moved to SF in 2018. In Melbourne, handroll shops aren’t just in every shopping village and mall, they’re on every single level of every shopping village and mall. “They’ve been a staple there for 20 or 25 years,” she explains.
Back in Australia, Trower was a filmmaker with a handroll habit. It was her profession that was supposed to immigrate with her across the Pacific—and it did. She was working on another film project—had even secured some local funding to complete it—but with a second baby boy joining the family just a couple years after the move, the timing was off.
Meanwhile, on trips back home, Trower says, “I’d be hitting up all the handroll shops.” If she was putting her film career on hiatus, why not turn her habit into her new day job?
Cooked tuna handrolls are one of Australia's most popular styles.(Kristen Loken)
“Even my picky son loves the cooked tuna handroll—that’s the staple in Australia, the top roll,” Trower laughs. Confident San Francisco would, too, Trower opened Handroll Hawker in Russian Hill on September 29th.
Together, the words “cooked,” “tuna,” and “handroll” sound a little fishy to me personally (no pun intended) but when I try Handroll Hawker’s version, I immediately get why they’re so appealing down under. Inside, what tastes like a tasty, light-on-the-mayo tuna salad lies on a bed of rice made with aged red vinegar (a more elevated version of the white vinegar that’s typically used in Australia). The approximately 3.5-inch-long by 1.5-inch-wide roll is wrapped tightly together with a crunchy cucumber and left fully intact instead of being cut into pieces. If you’re on the go, they give it to you in a cheerful pink paper bag that you fold down as you eat like the foil on a tiny burrito.
The cooked tuna roll, along with the crispy chicken—another Aussie staple filled with red vinegar rice, a juicy finger of fried chicken, tangy aioli, and lettuce—have been among the most popular of the nine styles served at Handroll Hawker; seeing them cross international boundaries of taste has “been a delight,” says Trower.
The menu’s other handrolls have fillings more familiar to temaki connoisseurs: tempura shrimp, salmon and avocado, avocado and cucumber. Instead of a chopped spicy tuna, Handroll Hawker makes theirs the Aussie way, with a whole piece of fish and a thin layer of housemade spicy yuzu mayo.
Spicy tuna handrolls are made with a single hunk of fish instead of chopped.(Kristen Loken)
While the rolls are relatively simple, Handroll Hawker is operating with a level of culinary expertise not typically found in Melbourne’s shops and kiosks. Trower went to culinary school in Tokyo to learn things like proper sushi roll construction and sushi rice preparation so that she could have the base of knowledge necessary to communicate with Tai Trinh, the former chef at high-end omakase restaurant Robin whom she tapped to take the helm at the shop. In addition to rolls, the menu also includes housemade vegan, gluten-free miso soup and yuzu lemonade, a take on the classic that’s bright, tart, and intensely fragrant.
The pink-and-teal mural-covered shop is also a departure from Australia’s standard handroll spots, most of which hawk their wares in a purely transactional way over counters without a lot of personality. On one wall, artist Serge Gay Jr. painted a girl in heart-shaped sunglasses with her hair curled in handrolls; on another, phantom legs kick classic rollerskates into the sky. Cherries, the shop’s logo, accent the space, which has a couple of sleek white tables anchored to a wall-length wooden booth and a counter with stools inside. Outside, a few tables are positioned beside the shop’s glowing pink exterior.
So far, Handroll Hawker is dishing out more than 800 rolls a day on busy Saturdays, and customers have been pretty evenly split between those who carry their rolls off in signature pink boxes with a donut shop vibe, and those who sit to eat.
Chef Tai Trinh and owner Romi Trower in front of Serge Gay Jr.'s murals at Handroll Hawker(Kristen Loken)
Either way, says Trower, “even with a line, we’re getting sushi out faster than people get their coffee.”
Though it’s pretty quiet on the Tuesday afternoon I visit, I take my set to go, carrying the sweet pink box back to my car, so that I can put their portability to the test on a drive across the Bay Bridge. One roll ($7) is considered a snack, three ($18) are a light meal. I load up with four ($24), the addictive Australian staples (cooked tuna and crispy chicken), the meaty spicy tuna, and one of two vegetarian rolls into which they’ve tucked a slightly sweet sheet of inari along with pickled daikon radish and cucumber, creating what’s turned out to be a delicious, well-balanced sweet-and-sour sleeper hit.
Lest I thought Trower was exaggerating about the virtues of the food’s portability (just see this Instagram reel the filmmaker put together), my not-so-scientific experiment proves it to be true: Despite both eyes on the road and one hand on the steering wheel, not a single grain of rice falls from the nori as I take each roll down in four solid bites.
// Handroll Hawker is open daily from 11:30am to 7:30pm; 2360 Polk St. (Russian Hill), handrollhawker.com
The interior of Handroll Hawker(Kristen Loken)
