Rocky Aoki, who founded the theatrical Benihana chain of over 100 steakhouses worldwide, where Japanese chefs with flashing knives double as performers, died Thursday night, July 10, in Manhattan, NY. He was 69.
The cause was pneumonia, said a spokeswoman for the family. He was also known to suffer from diabetes and hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion. In 1964, when Aoki opened his first Benihana steakhouse, on West 56th Street in Manhattan, he introduced New Yorkers to dining as theater, and chefs as culinary acrobats. Seated around a flat steel grill, customers watched chefs sharpen their knives, toss them in the air, drizzle the grill with oil, sizzle the chicken, shrimp or steak on the grill, and flip the food onto the plates. Children stared goggle-eyed. Benihana’s style of food is called teppan-yaki. (Aoki was a skilled and championship-winning offshore boat racer, but he was nearly killed more than once in the unforgiving sport; Below, Aoki had his own look and style, clearly comfortable with himself).
Aoki also introduced many Americans to Japanese food. “He was the first one who made it accessible for non-Japanese people to enjoy the Japanese experience,” said Drew Nieporent, whose Myriad Restaurant Group runs a number of restaurants including Tribeca Grill and Nobu. “The key thing was he made it fun,” he said.
Before Benihana opened, most Japanese restaurants in New York were styled only for the Japanese population, Nieporent said. Aoki changed the environment. (Some of the information in this posting is from the NY Times' obituary on Aoki, and let's face it, isn't that where we all want our obits to be, too?).
Living in New York with my family at that time, I can remember going to a Chinese restaurant somewhere in Brooklyn which was known to us kids by the name, "Avenue M," though that almost definitely wasn't the place's real name. But to our family it was the height of Asian cookery, though we didn't call it Asian, we called it Oriental or used some slang term. The thought of going to a Japanese restaurant never entered any of our minds; we certainly didn't know anything about what Japanese people ate, and don't think we'd ever even seen a Japanese restaurant, and this in the world's most cosmopolitan city. If it were Chinese, though, or of course, Italian, there were always Chinatown and Little Italy, right next to each other, on Manhattan Island, and those areas are there to this day, more than 40 years later.
But when we moved to Southern California in 1969, I was exposed for the first time in my life to Japanese people, in my school and working at local businesses. Being brave (at least I thought so) I even visited a few of the Japanese restaurants in Westminster and Garden Grove in Orange County, and liked some of what I ate, and as time went on I learned what Japanese foods I enjoyed and which I didn't. During this period, while the Vietnam War was still on, with Orange County serving as home to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Base and the Marine base called LTA, because it had housed submarine-hunting dirigibles before WW II and the letters stood for Lighter Than Air (with the two largest wood buildings in the Northern Hemisphere serving as the blimps' houses; buildings so large they had their own weather!).
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