Raw deal: supermarket sushi nourishes Philip Manung's American dream.

• Author: Davis, Lisa
• Position: COVER STORY

Spicy salmon, tuna-avocado and California rolls compete for space in a display case with less-common fare such as polio picante, made of grilled chicken., bell peppers and jalapenos rolled in rice and seaweed and topped with eel sauce and sesame seeds. As passengers scurry to afternoon flights at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport, a few stop to grab a bite and check their cellphones. Leaning against the counter is a man who is neither hungry nor in a hurry.

Wearing a suit jacket, jeans and sneakers, Philip Mating chats with the chefs, who are dressed in black. "Every time I go into a sushi bar, I enjoy meeting all the people, the customers" he says. "I love to talk." He's not a gadfly and unlike the cuisine, he's not Japanese. Maung is from Burma and of Chinese extraction. He has kept close tabs on this place since it opened nearly two years ago. Sales, he knows, are growing fast.

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He owns this sushi bar, plus another one that recently opened on the international concourse, his first forays into airport restaurants. Then there are his 400 or so sushi kiosks, most in high-end supermarkets across the country. About 400 employees and independent contractors work for Hissho Sushi, which had sales of $43.6 million last year, up 26% from 2010 and nearly 61%? from 2009. Driven by a dream, he is always probing, looking for ways to grow, to expand. Hissho is Japanese for "certain victory," his brash prediction for a business he started 14 years ago in his Charlotte living room with $100,000 borrowed from family, friends and credit cards.

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"He's very charismatic, very approachable, and he's very intelligent" says Mark Allison, dean of culinary education at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte. There's another key to his success: "He hit at just the right time on a great idea." For the last two years, Hissho Sushi has been on Inc. magazine's list of the 5,000 fastest-growing American private companies, ranking among the top 100 in the highly competitive food-and-beverage sector, and was No. 18 last year on the inaugural North Carolina Mid-Market Fast 40, compiled by Cherry, Bekaert & Holland LLP, a Richmond, Va.-based accounting and consulting firm. In 2009, Maung was Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for the Southeast. In the nation's gloomy economy, such success has not gone unnoticed.

Last summer, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx and his Republican challenger, Scott Stone, both visited the company's Queen City headquarters. Then the White House started calling, and Mating, 45, flew to Washington, where he sat in the same row as Michelle Obama during the president's high-profile jobs speech to a joint session of Congress in September. Also in this section of invited guests were "the American Express chairman, the GE chairman. They all sat in back. AOL owner Steve Case sat in back," he says. "Nobody knows who I am."

He can't help but laugh. Growing up on the other side of the world, Maung Phone Lwin would lie in bed, exhausted from scraping fat and plucking hair off pig skins, staring at the moon through holes in the roof of his house. Now he has basked in bright lights, below the Capitol's iconic dome, two seats away from the first lady of the United States.

The airport setting makes sense, considering that sushi was one of the original fast foods. "A lot of people think sushi is going to be all raw fish, which, in fact, it is not," Allison says. "It's just anything rolled in rice that's been fermented." Its origins go back thousands of years to when Southeast Asian farmers stored fish in slowly fermenting rice to keep it from spoiling. Later, a faster way to get the same flavor was devised--dousing it with sugar, salt and rice vinegar. In the 1800s, Japanese street merchants sold sushi rice topped with fish as a quick eat.

It came to America after World War II, when sushi bars opened in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo section. There, in the late '60s or early '70s, a Japanese chef invented the California roll, filled with crab, cucumber and avocado and wrapped with rice rather than seaweed on the outside. That helped establish sushi's popularity, but only in the last two decades has it gone mainstream, propelled by diners seeking alternative, healthier ways...