Zac Hill combines Japanese and Southern influences at Gaijin Sandos pop-up

Zac Hill grew up in Fairhope, Alabama, and came to New Orleans to attend Tulane University. While he had plans to open a coffee shop, he got more interested in cooking as a creative outlet. After four years at Union Ramen, he launched a Japanese-inspired, from-scratch sandwich pop-up called Gaijin Sandos, using the Japanese term for sandwiches. His regular pop-ups are in the Marigny and Bywater, and he will be at Sea Cave on Thursday, Feb. 27, and Wednesday, March 5, and Thursday, March 6; and at AllWays Lounge on Friday, Feb. 28; at Anna’s on Saturday, March 1; at Parleaux Beer Lab on Lundi Gras. For more information, see @gaijinsandos on Instagram.

Gambit: How did you get interested in cooking?

Zac Hill: I have always cooked. I started cooking with my grandmother when I was about 8. She has this story about me walking into the kitchen one day and saying, “I need to cook.” She let me pick out whatever recipes I wanted out of her cookbooks, and she let me do as much as I could. I think the first one I did was pot roast, or some classic American thing out of the Betty Crocker cookbook. I have been cooking ever since.

I came here for school at Tulane when I was 18. I started an economics and architecture double major because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I was thinking I’d have a cafe, because I was really into this coffeeshop/comic book shop idea. Toward the end of school, I decided I wanted to do something with more creativity than coffee.

My first restaurant job was at District Donuts on Magazine Street. I was doing coffee. Then I started managing the coffee-focus District by Whole Foods. I did that for a year. Then I was going to move to Detroit, where I was going to work at a contemporary Roman restaurant. But Covid happened, and that fell through.

Gambit: How did you get interested in Japanese food?

Hill: Like 10 weeks into Covid, I was going stir crazy. I walked by Union Ramen and saw that they were hiring. I applied to bartend, thinking that would be an easy in, and was hoping to move to the kitchen, but they hired me as a cook.

That was my first real foray into any sort of East or Southeast Asian cuisine. Chef Nhat (Nguyen) was very open to people putting forward ideas, so I got into it and started doing some research. I wanted to get a dish on the menu, and I did. It was tempura mushroom fries with jalapeno-lime aioli and garlic powder on top.

They made me sous chef after 17 months, and chef de cuisine five months after that. I had to know my stuff at that point. I did lots of research and had lots of cookbooks. I looked up a lot of specific izakaya foods, and I did a lot of reading about Japanese home cooking and using that to get more of an idea of Japanese flavor profiles.

There was Cajun and Asian fusion (at Union Ramen). We wanted to tie dishes to Japan in at least one way and to New Orleans in at least one way. One of my more successful dishes was a panko-crusted catfish, like togarashi- and panko-crusted catfish, that I served with a carrot puree and meuniere sauce. I did a “red beans and rice,” but it was more of a Southern version of a Japanese dish called sekihan, made with sweet rice and azuki beans, the Asian red beans.

Gambit: Why did you start your pop-up?

Hill: I learned a lot from chef Nhat. But I had an opportunity to do a pop-up. The first one was at d.b.a. They were looking for someone to do food. I did a panko shrimp sando. And I did the fried chicken sando and miso cabbage sando that I still do. I rocked with those three for a little while. Then I introduced the karaage (Japanese-style fried chicken), which I almost always have.

I like the Japanese approach: simplicity, let the ingredients speak, don’t over complicate something. Because I had been doing it for a while, I felt like it was true to me and my food history.

I wanted to do Japanese style sandos, but more informed by my food history and foods I ate growing up. I am Japanese inspired, Southern influenced. I keep things straight forward, the most pared down version of something I can while presenting a well-rounded sandwich. Being able to make my own milk bread and doing everything from scratch is important to me.

There are sando pop-ups in New York and LA. They’re now on menus of places that do general Japanese cuisine. Also, I had already done milk bread before. I can make some pretty good milk bread, so there was a confluence of factors. It’s an easy street food. I can make it American or Southern.

I am going to bring shrimp back on the menu for Lent, maybe do an ebi katsu, basically a shrimp patty katsu, and I’ll dress it up like a po-boy — lettuce, tomatoes and my house mayo. I spend a lot of hours between the bread and mayo, but I think it’s worth it. It’s better quality than I could buy.

The fried chicken sando was the first thing I figured out. I had panko-fired shrimp at first, but now I do a patty melt. I took it off in large part because the patty melt doesn’t require a crazy amount of prep time. Patty melts were like late night Waffle House food in high school and Whataburger. I like American flavors that are familiar to my upbringing and my clientele.