Yum Yum Sauce • Shrimp Sauce • Sakura Sauce • The Recipe Finally Revealed
Before 1964, most Americans had never seen a chef cook their dinner three feet in front of them. There were no onion volcanoes, no flying shrimp tails, no theatrical knife work at the table. The entire experience that millions of Americans now associate with a night out at a Japanese steakhouse was introduced to this country by one determined young man with $10,000 and a dream.
His name was Hiroaki Aoki. Americans would come to know him as Rocky.
Rocky Aoki was born in Tokyo in 1938, the son of Yunosuke Aoki, a popular Japanese entertainer and the descendant of a samurai. After World War II, Yunosuke and his wife Katsu opened a small coffee shop in Tokyo. They named it Benihana (meaning "red flower") after a red safflower they found blooming in the rubble of a city still recovering from the firebombing of 1945. The name was a small symbol of resilience in a difficult time.
Rocky grew up in that coffee shop, learning the restaurant business from the ground up. He watched his father understand something important: that people did not just come to eat. They came for an experience. That lesson would define everything Rocky did next.
Rocky was a gifted athlete who trained as a wrestler and nearly qualified for the 1960 Summer Olympics. He came to the United States to attend college, and after graduating he had an idea: bring teppanyaki-style cooking to American audiences. But he needed money to start.
His solution was characteristically bold. He drove a Mister Softee ice cream truck through the streets of Harlem, placing a small Japanese paper umbrella on every cone he sold. He saved $10,000 (worth roughly $100,000 in today's dollars) and, with an additional loan from his father, he was ready.
Rocky opened the first American Benihana on West 56th Street in New York City in 1964. It was a tiny four-table restaurant designed to look like a Japanese farmhouse, with food prepared on steel teppanyaki grills right in front of the customers. His highly trained chefs cooked with theatrical precision, chopping, flipping, and seasoning in a performance that was as entertaining as it was delicious.
The restaurant nearly failed. For the first six months, Rocky and his family members took shifts working at other restaurants just to pay the bills. Then, in early 1965, legendary food critic Clementine Paddleford of the New York Herald-Tribune gave Benihana a rave review. New Yorkers flooded in, and Rocky found himself turning diners away. The restaurant paid for itself in six months. The Beatles and Muhammad Ali became regulars at the tiny four-table room.
Rocky's genius was understanding what American diners would love about teppanyaki. He gave them great food, but he also gave them a show, a shared experience, and something to talk about afterward. The communal table, where strangers sat together and watched a chef perform, was completely unlike anything else in American dining at the time.
By 1968, Benihana had expanded to Chicago. By 1972, there were six locations across the United States. The concept Rocky introduced would eventually inspire hundreds of Japanese steakhouses across the country, many of them family-owned restaurants in cities and towns that would never have had access to Japanese cuisine otherwise.
Rocky Aoki died in 2008 at the age of 69. His son Steve Aoki became one of the world's most successful electronic music DJs. His daughter Devon Aoki became a fashion model and actress. But Rocky's most lasting legacy is probably the experience of millions of Americans who have sat around a teppanyaki grill, watched an onion volcano erupt, and tasted that unforgettable white sauce for the first time.
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