It’s a departure from your typical A-List sushi house or your favorite hole-in-the-wall late-night spot to help satisfy that salty, savory sushi craving. In fact, the sushi in America – for the most part – isn’t authentic Japanese Nigirizushi. Until now.

Sugarfish by celebrated Japanese Chef Kazunori Nozawa, uses a technique that it describes as “old school values” with a “new school vision.” A rare gem in the heart of Brentwood, Los Angeles, Sugarfish is one of (if not THE) best sushi venues you can find precisely 5471.32 miles from Tokyo.

Forget about your “Crazy Dynamite,” “Green Dragon,” or “Spice Girl” rolls. You won’t find those here. And you definitely won’t be seeing the name “California” anywhere on the menu. Simplicity at it’s best is the only way to describe the magic that happens at SugarFish. Delectable and delish, even their soy sauce is home made. And any issues you may have with trust, leave them at the door.

Known as the “Sushi Nazi,” Chef Nozawa follows a centuries-old Japanese tradition called omakase, where the master chef determines the menu. You can choose from the “Trust Me,” “Trust Me/Lite” and “The Nozawa,” depending on how hungry you are. With additional locations in downtown Los Angeles, Marina del Rey and Santa Monica, almost anyone can experience the sweet art of fish.

Sushi in America has wandered far from it’s origins in Japanese culture. SugarFish has, if even for a brief moment, returned it to it’s rightful home. You’re going to have to TRUST ME on this one.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

By Adelle Nazarian

June 16: Iranian supporters of presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi stage a protest against presidential election results in Iran. (Photo by AP)

As Iran has been gripped by protest, violence and allegations of vote fraud in the wake of a contentious national election, people around the world are watching — but perhaps none more closely than the young Iranians who helped push voter turnout to record levels.

Some of those young Iranians, in interviews with FOXNews.com, spoke openly about their hopes and fears in the wake of the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s contested victory over reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi.

“My fellow (Iranian) classmates in Turkey were crying when they found out the news,” said Amir Arman, who is a 33-year-old doctoral candidate studying social psychology in Turkey.

He said he wanted Mousavi to win badly.

“Mousavi is not necessarily the best candidate. But he is the least-worst of all four candidates,” Arman said, adding that one of his reasons for backing Mousavi was his fear that the world’s oil reserves are running out. “If Mousavi comes to the stage, he will bring nuclear power to the scene.”

Arman also is concerned about the lack of civil freedoms in Iran and poor management of the government.

Other Iranians gave different reasons for voting for Mousavi.

“If there was a 1 percent, just a 1 percent chance that I could keep Ahmadinejad’s vote from coming up, that’s the chance I took,” said a 27-year-old woman who asked to be indentified only by her first name, Samereh, for fear of retribution.

Samereh, who moved to Shomal from Tehran for work a few months ago, compared the Iranian government to the Taliban. She said people are fed up and willing to die for their country.

Mid-conversation, the Yahoo chat function on her computer started faltering. Minutes later, her connection was lost.

“The government is taking satellites down from peoples’ homes,” she said. “They’re everywhere.”

Masoud, a 27-year-old computer engineer who is fluent in both English and Farsi, also spoke on condition that his last name not be revealed.

He currently is unemployed, which is common among today’s young people in Iran, a sign of less-than-hopeful economic times. Masoud blames Ahmadinejad for this and said that while Ahmadinejad is in office Iran’s “freedom, economic situation and our relation with other countries are getting worse.”

Samereh and Masoud both expressed frustration with Ahmadinejad’s “superstitious” mentality and how he used warnings of foreign threats as a tool to boost himself to the presidency.

“A lot of people voted for him because … they were afraid of Ahmadinejad’s curse,” Samereh said. “They play with peoples’ senses.”

All three Iranians said they are tired of the Islamic republic’s current regime, in particular its mismanagement of the government and the economy.

But in an unprecedented move, Iran’s 12-member Guardian Council announced it will review ballots in a partial recount after what is believed to be the largest voter turnout in Iranian history.

Not all Iranians are optimistic that the outcome will be fair.

“In these times, you can’t trust anyone,” Samereh said.

Friday, April 11, 2008

By Adelle Nazarian

Claire Sylvia and Jane Seymour (photo courtesy of friendsofjane.com)

She’d never liked beer, Snickers, green peppers or chicken nuggets before. It was only after she received her new heart and lungs that Claire Sylvia took on a slew of characteristics that soon would be her own.

Sylvia, 47, was dying from pulmonary hypertension — a disease that increases the body’s blood pressure in the lung vasculature and most often leads to death — in 1988 when she became the first person in New England to have a heart-lung transplant.

It was while recovering in the intensive care unit that she started feeling the presence of another body. When a writer reporting on her surgery asked her, “Now that you’ve had this miracle, what do you want more than anything else?” she was startled by her own answer:

“Actually,” she said, “I’m dying for a beer right now.”

There is no explanation for how Sylvia took on the characteristics and discovered the identity of Timothy Lamirande, the 18-year-old victim of a motorcycle accident whose heart has been beating in her chest for 20 years.

In her book, “A Change of Heart,” she describes how she discovered her unknown donor’s identity through her dreams and sensations.

In the months following her surgery, Sylvia says, she discovered a newfound confidence she’d never experienced. She found herself in better health, she was in better shape and while she “still felt attracted to men, I didn’t feel that same need to have a boyfriend.”

Her teenage daughter described her gait as being very manly. Sylvia also experienced a dramatic change in her level of energy and health. “I used to get sick a lot, and since I’ve gotten Tim’s heart, I rarely get sick,” she said Thursday in a phone interview from her home in Florida, where she moved six years ago from Maine.

But how is it possible for someone to take on the traits of an organ donor? And how is it possible to learn the unknown donor’s name through a dream?

Sylvia says the defining moment came to her a few months after the transplant surgery, when she had a dream about a tall young man with sandy hair whom she associated with the name “Tim L.”

“I woke up knowing that Tim L. was my donor and that some parts of his spirit and personality were now within me.”

Transplant patients are never told the names of their donors, for reasons of privacy. But Sylvia somehow had gotten through to the other side.

After a second dream nine months later, and the question still burning inside her, Sylvia decided she needed to meet her donor’s family.

She contacted the hospital’s transplant coordinator, Gail Eddy, in hopes of getting in touch with them, but to no avail. The transplant program observes a strict code of confidentiality. Even after mentioning Tim L.’s name, Eddy refused to provide the information. “Let it go. You’re opening a can of worms,” she told Sylvia.

But a few months later, and with the help of friend who’d said he’d dreamt of Tim L.’s obituary the night they’d met at a local theater, Sylvia got up the nerve to track her donor’s family down. She and her friend found Tim Lamirande’s obituary, including his name and address, in a Boston newspaper.

She wrote the Lamirandes, and they agreed to meet with her. All her questions were confirmed as the young man’s parents and siblings attested to Tim’s food tastes and personality traits.

Would Sylvia be different today had her donor not been Tim, but a woman?

She thinks so.

“Because every person has their own set of memories imbued in the heart and when they’re transferred, their memories become part of the recipient’s persona,” she told FOXNews.com. “I definitely would have been different.”

Sylvia says she conducted research for 10 years after the heart and lung transplant and found other organ recipients who experienced the same, if not similar, changes in their personalities.

How did she know Tim L. was her donor?

“Sometimes you just know,” she says. “It’s just what you believe. Especially if you’re a spiritual person. You can’t see love, you can’t touch it, you can’t smell it. But you know there is love there. It just depends on what you believe.”

Sylvia, who is Jewish, describes Tim’s family as being very spiritual. “They are a very practicing, very devout family,” she says. “So I have a Catholic heart inside this Jewish girl. … I always was spiritual and have always believed in things of the spirit. This just reinforced it.”

But her story doesn’t end there.

Ten years later, in 1998, Sylvia received a kidney transplant from her ballroom dancing partner and ex-boyfriend. She says she experienced a post-surgery phenomenon similar to the first. This time, she gained a fondness for cooking.

“I started baking and making things for him that I hadn’t done before,” Sylvia revealed in a phone interview. “He said, ‘You cook just like my mother used to.’ ” His mother would cook for him often.

Now 68, she accepts that her story is baffling. “Doctors run when they see me. They don’t know how to take it. I’m like a pink elephant and they don’t know what to do with me.”

She lives with Parkinson’s disease, has survived breast cancer, has only half a thyroid and a very bad case of shingles for which she recently had surgery. “I’ve survived a lot of different, different things,” she says.

She remains in touch with Tim L.’s family. She is close to his mother and they exchange Christmas gifts when she goes to Boston, where his family resides. She plans on flying there on May 23, just six days before the 20th anniversary of Tim’s gift of life to her.

As for those characteristics she adopted from Tim? For the first few years, Sylvia felt as though she was going through life with two sets of eyes. Since then, that has tapered off and “they are all a part of me. I inherited them and that happened a long time ago. They are my new being.”

“A Change of Heart” has been published in 12 different languages. In 2002, the film “Heart of a Stranger,” starring Jane Seymour, was released based on the book.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

 By Adelle Nazarian

Are there gays in Iran?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asked about the issue of homosexuality in his country during his controversial appearance at Columbia University two weeks ago, said there aren’t.

Or maybe he said there are. It’s hard to tell.

The Iranian leader, through a spokesman, sought Wednesday to clarify his remarks, which generated both anger and laughter during his visit to New York.

Two weeks ago, when asked if there were gay people in his country, Ahmadinejad said, through an interpreter:

“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.”

On Wednesday, Ahmadinejad’s media adviser, Mohammad Kalhor, told Reuters what the president really meant to say was that the United States had a larger gay population than Iran. He said Ahmadinejad was simply misunderstood by Western media.

“What Ahmadinejad said was not a political answer,” Kalhor told Reuters. “He said that, compared to American society, we don’t have many homosexuals.”

So, as they say in New York … Let’s go to the videotape.

FOXNews.com has reviewed a video copy of the speech through a Farsi interpreter.

When asked about gays in the Islamic Republic, Ahmadinejad replied:

“In Iran, firstly, we do not have homosexuals like you have here [in this country]. In our country, such a thing does not exist.”

Kalhor told Reuters that Ahmadinejad did not intend to imply that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Rather, he said, the president wanted to say that homosexuality is not as common as it is in the West because of cultural and religious differences.

Homosexuality is punishable by death in the Islamic Republic.

Human rights groups have posted pictures of homosexuals purportedly being hanged in Iran.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

By Adelle Nazarian

Courtesty of FOX News Channel

Even everyday people can live out their rock star dreams. Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp is a one-day crash course in rock ‘n’ roll jamming that provides amateur musicians with an opportunity to feel what it’s like to be in Guns N’ Roses or AC/DC.

Founded in November 1997 by tour promoter David Fishof, the goal of this camp is to provide people with a platform to achieve their rock ‘n’ roll fantasies.

And at Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp, where actual rock stars mentor each camper through some of their most famous hits, your rock ‘n’ roll dreams can come true.

Video: Click here to watch video of Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp in session

ON THE SCENE: Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp

“I’ve always had these dreams of sitting out there on the stage and I talk to people for a living without the guitar, and my wife said you should be out there with a guitar,” bond strategist and camper Alan Todd told FOX News.

Camper Craig Harold, a court clerk, said he walked in the door and didn’t know what he was doing.

“I have no musical experience,” he said.

Experience is not necessary and it doesn’t matter what your day job is, although it’s probably a good idea to have one. All amateurs are welcome, and all that’s required is a love of rock ‘n’ roll … and $2,000 for a one-day session.

“In the first band I had in Boston, one guy played nothing, so we put him on cowbell,” said Kip Winger, a musician and Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp counselor.

Campers even get to perform live on stage to a sold-out audience at a major rock venue.

“You get up there [and] it’s win lose or draw. There’s been some major train wrecks and there’s been some incredible bands,” Winger said.

This year, participants started rocking in Oklahoma on July 9 with actual stars such as Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple, Gilby Clarke of Guns N’ Roses, Chris Slade of AC/DC and hit writer for Aerosmith and Ozzy Osbourne Mark Hudson at the Rocklahoma Festival.

“Anybody can be a rock star, it’s just a matter of opening the door and saying, ’Hi, here I am,’” Hughes said in an exclusive interview with FOX News.

So for anyone who has ever wanted to be able to say “I’m with the band,” Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp is providing that opportunity. Rock on!