In the oft hectic and unpredictable restaurant world, Jerome Ito had what might seem like a cushy gig. As the head sushi chef of the first full-service, sit-down sushi bar at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, he was clocking relatively normal hours at one of the biggest names in tech.
“You’re working 7-to-3, you’re off on weekends and holidays, you get paid holidays,” he recalled. “It’s like a regular job. You have a life.”
But after a year at Google, Ito left that stability behind. Together with his wife Linh Tran-Ito, who is a physician, he launched Go Fish Poke Bar in San Jose in 2015. “It was a gamble,” he said. “We were having our first child, and it was like, ‘You’re gonna give all that up?’”…