Like father ...

At a recent lunch at Fuji in Haddonfield, we arrived to find master chef and owner Matt Ito poised behind the sushi bar. I turned away for a moment and he was gone through the kitchen curtain. Within seconds, though, another chef named Ito emerged and stood in his place - a virtual carbon copy, but 36 years younger.

Long knife in hand, Jesse Ito evokes the image of his dad. And while his father still crafts the exquisitely creative kaiseki tasting meals that for three decades have made him one of the region's greatest chefs, Jesse has been Fuji's head sushi chef for nearly three years now. As he prepared us a spontaneous chef's choice of the freshest raw fish, it was clear he had inherited his father's magic touch.

Sublimely fresh chunks of tuna were stacked up against a mound of guacamole ringed by pools of sweet soy dappled with herby green oil. Two pearlescent ribbons of hamachi, each cut from different parts of the fish, curled around balls of perfectly toothy rice with two-toned stripes of silver and black skin. Delicate slices of pink albacore - "poor man's o-toro," says Jesse - melted across my tongue with a buttery omega-3 glow. A live scallop twitched the moment it met Jesse's blade, then appeared seconds later over the counter unfolded like an ivory flower glossed with a chopstick dab of truffle oil.

"He's really got Matt's talent," says longtime customer Sam Cohen, who's been eating at Fuji for 30 years. "And I've known him since he was a rugrat."

For regular customers like Cohen - who's had a standing reservation at the sushi bar each Friday night, culminating in a round of "wasabi roulette" (one piece on the platter spiked with a tear-inducing dose of horseradish) - Jesse's presence beside his father is "a statement of continuity." Jesse's mother, Yeonghui, also still runs the front of the house as a partner in the restaurant (though she and Matt are now divorced).

But no one is under any illusion that working so closely with a parent always goes smoothly, especially with a boss as exacting as Matt Ito.

"Who wants to work for their father?" says Cohen. "Didn't you read Oedipus?"