Has the handroll sushi wave finally found its way to Philly?

In November 2024, Chubby Nori entered the chat. Situated above Chubby Cattle in Chinatown, a hot pot restaurant, and housing seven spillover booths that serve hot pot in its dining room, you might mistake it for one of those rarefied omakase counters.

Philly has the Chubby Group’s only handroll bar so far — most of its locations and forthcoming restaurants are hot pot or shabu shabu-style restaurants — though additional Chubby Nori locations are set to open in Los Angeles and New York in coming weeks.

At Chubby Nori in Chinatown, there’s the light plywood paneling, cushy chairs, and walls consisting of shoji screens. Each seat is outfitted with a square platter on top of its raised bar that allow diners to grasp each roll with their fingers moments after they are served.

Chubby Nori doesn’t try to stuff you with rolls and shove you out the door while cleaning your portion of the counter with disinfectant the moment you’re done eating, like at KazuNori, but the wasabi is green-dyed horseradish, like at most lower-end sushi restaurants. The cooks behind the line wear vinyl gloves and heat up cooked fish for certain rolls with minimal implements: blowtorches and a tiny toaster oven.

Chubby Nori attempts to provide an accessible luxury, with rolls containing items like truffle avocado and yellowtail starting at $5.50 and $6.50, respectively, and an A5 Miyazaki wagyu roll starting at $16.50, to which you may add Hokkaido uni for an additional $7.50 and foie gras with an apple compote for another $5.50.

Uni, wagyu, foie gras, truffle. These are all the loudest signifiers of luxury when it comes to food. And you can get them all at Chubby Nori for a bargain, rolled well enough.

Chubby Group is able to offer such pricing because of innovative approaches to reordering their supply chain, said cofounder David Zhao, 30, who started the business in the two gap years he took before going to college at Wharton.

Zhao said Chubby purchases entire cows, and large quantities of fish, cutting out the middlemen that usually shuttle these ingredients from producers to restaurants. Chubby also owns its own frozen logistics trucks, with routes connecting cities that Chubby Group operates in. Chubby Group’s first Philadelphia location, situated below Chubby Nori, opened in 2018, in Zhao’s second year of college.

Chubby Group is on an opening rampage, with 30 more locations of its concepts, from hot pot to handroll bars, set to open around the country by the end of 2025. Zhao compared the business model to that of Netflix and Amazon, but in Chubby’s case, conveying high-quality foods to the masses, with an emphasis on memberships. There are 50,000 paying members of the “Chubby Club,” who receive meal discounts.

“The key to the handrolls is that we want our customers to be able to use our loyalty program across the board, while also utilizing our supply chain at all these different concepts,” said Zhao, who framed the business plan from a technology-driven perspective. That’s why the Chubby Group wants to go beyond hot pot, BBQ, and skewers, and into handrolls.