How Teriyaki Became Seattle's Own Fast-Food Phenomenon

Rave all you want about Rover's, Lampreia, and Harvest Vine. What really defines a city's food scene is not its four-star restaurants but its most plebeian cuisine—the glorified street fare that no one thinks about but everyone eats. San Francisco has its super burrito, Philadelphia its cheesesteak. And in the grand picture, someday Seattle's hallowed salmon, voluptuous berries, and cloud-kissed mushrooms may be eclipsed in the national imagination by another local specialty: teriyaki.

You know what a teriyaki shop is, just as you know its variations are minuscule and infinite. You can probably find one in any given strip mall, a bare-bones storefront with a few plastic-topped tables. Typically, there'll be a paper sign advertising a $5.99 chicken teriyaki special taped to the cash register and a culinary hodgepodge on the menu board above it: teriyaki (beef, chicken, salmon), spicy beef, sesame chicken, yakisoba, bibimbap, and California rolls.

Chances are the food is decent but not mind-blowing. But at $7 a meal, who's expecting mind-blowing?

Nothing seems to stop the exponential growth of teriyaki shops in Seattle and its surrounding environs, including market saturation. To wit, the Washington Restaurant Association recently generated a list of all the restaurants in its master database with "teriyaki" in the name, listed by date of entry. As of 1984, the database contained 19 (that is, restaurants still in business). That number doubled by 1987. In the mid-1990s, 20 to 40 teriyaki joints appear to have been opening every year, and the database now contains 519 listings statewide (there are more than 100 teriyaki shops within Seattle's city limits alone)—which doesn't include restaurants that favor "Bento," "Wok," or "Deli" over "Teriyaki" in their titles.

And that's far from the extent of the dish's omnipresence. Pho shops pad their menus with chicken teriyaki. Asian-operated burger joints like Herfy's, Stan's and Dome Burger all feature teriyaki dishes. A Somali cafe down in Tukwila that I reviewed last month offered halal chicken teriyaki; not to mention sushi restaurants, even ultratraditional ones, which offer teriyaki chicken and beef on their menus—something (surprise) you'd never see in Japan.

If you're looking for the roots of the teriyaki shop in Seattle's Nihonmachi, a 12-block Japanese neighborhood (spanning Alaskan Way to the west to 14th Avenue South to the east, and north-south from Yesler to Jackson) that thrived from the late 1880s to World War II, you're essentially out of luck. A historian-compiled map of the area published in Gail Dubrow and Donna Graves' Sento at Sixth and Main plots the existence of tofu makers, noodle shops, and Maneki Restaurant—which celebrated its centennial in 2004—but no teriyaki shops. Same with a 1936 Japantown directory, though Japanese chop suey houses were apparently all the rage.

Nagai Kafu, a Japanese writer who memorialized the years he spent in Tacoma and Seattle in a 1908 short-story collection called American Stories, may offer the only glimpse we get of a proto–teriyaki shop. In "A Night at Seattle Harbor," his narrator spends an evening wandering around Nihonmachi, stopping in at a sooty basement restaurant whose proprietor offers him tempura, soba noodles in soup, and sake. After the meal, the narrator regains the street, following three men whose conversation he has been eavesdropping on: "Turning right at the straight main street, just as they were doing, I found that the road narrowed but was filled with more and more people, and saw on one side of it stalls grilling pork or beef with smelly oil. It seems that such a scene, with stalls in the poorer streets or bad quarters, is not limited just to Asakusa in Tokyo."

In fact, teriyaki's pedigree can be best described as a mutt of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and European cuisines. And its origins are far more recent—and intensely local.

In 1976, Toshihiro Kasahara, a young man with a wiry wrestler's build and a demure trickster's smile, arrived in Seattle, nine years after emigrating from Ashikaga City, Japan, to study business at Portland State University. He finished school in 1972, then bounced around the country, working as a shipping clerk and doing short cooking stints in Japanese restaurants. He ended up in Seattle because it seemed to offer him greater opportunity than Portland. That opportunity was teriyaki.

On March 2, 1976, Kasahara opened Toshi's Teriyaki Restaurant at 372 Roy St., on Lower Queen Anne. It had 30 seats and five menu items: teriyaki chicken, teriyaki beef, and tori udon (noodles in chicken broth), which were served all day long, plus teriyaki steak and Japanese-style chicken curry at dinner. Each plate came with a mound of white rice, packed into a scalloped mold that he imported from Japan, as well as a cabbage salad with a sesame oil and rice-wine vinegar dressing. The cost for a chicken teriyaki plate, including sales tax, was $1.85. Chicken-beef combos ran a whopping $2.10.

Kasahara can't say what inspired him to use sugar instead of the traditional sweet rice wine in his teriyaki sauce—it could have been a Hawaiian inspiration, but more likely it was cost—but the ur-teriyaki, the teriyaki from which a thousand restaurants have sprung, was a blend of soy, sugar, and chicken juices brushed onto yakitori, or grilled chicken on a stick. "I made teriyaki sauce and put chicken or beef on skewers," he says. "I broiled them, then dipped them in sauce, and went back and forth into the oven."