Then there are teriyaki's missionaries. In 2002, Kirkland native Eric Garma finished his degree in business administration and moved to Las Vegas. He and his cousins, Rodney and Alan Arreola, who'd grown up eating at the Teriyaki Madness in Kirkland, were brainstorming their first postcollege business.
Garma was driving around the desert city, looking at the storefronts, when he thought, "Hey, there are no teriyakis here." So the three approached the former owner of their hometown store, who agreed to sell them his recipes and show them how his operation worked. With some family money, they opened a teriyaki shop in Vegas, and business has since taken off.
Kevin P. Casey
Toshi today.
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They've now got two corporate stores in the city and three franchise licenses, with two more franchise stores opening up this September. Garma's also planning to open a store in Boulder, with the goal of spreading Teriyaki Madness (mascot: an Asian Elvis impersonator) throughout Nevada, Colorado, and other Southwestern states.
"With the health craze, it's the perfect time for this to happen in Las Vegas," Garma says. "Everyone's raving about Asian food. I think the next big thing here would be pho and Thai food, eventually, but the first thing is teriyaki because a lot of Americans know teriyaki [sauce]."
Teriyaki is fascinating because it is so nondescript—so perfectly a mirror of who we are and how we eat in Seattle that we pay no attention to it. I've eaten at a dozen teriyaki shops in the past two weeks, and the quality has varied wildly. I've suffered through dry mystery meat covered in soy-flavored pancake syrup, and devoured juicy chicken thighs lacquered in a complex salty-sweet marinade. The two shops I will seek out again? The one around the corner from my office, and the one just down the street from my house.
The point isn't that teriyaki shops are fantastic or awful—it's that they're cheap, fresh, and convenient, which is what Toshi Kasahara always intended. "I wanted to make a dish that was very affordable, so that it might be cheaper for people to come eat at my restaurant instead of making their own meal."
When he looks at his legacy, Kasahara does get concerned about quality. "I wish they'd do a little better of a job," he says of his many imitators. "When I opened the first store, I pretty much cooked to order. I didn't have a steam table [to keep cooked meat in] because it gets dry. Probably all of them have one now, to keep the meat ready to go."
Thirty years on, Kasahara still cooks teriyaki chicken for his family. "The other day, my kids bought teriyaki home from the Kirkland store," he says. "I thought it was pretty good. They say, 'It's pretty good, but not as good as yours.' I think they were just trying to flatter me."
jkauffman@seattleweekly.com
