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!).
The base was used for helicopters and their crews headed to or coming home from the War. And with those coming home were many, many Japanese and Vietnamese women who had married US soldiers. These women quickly established themselves in their respective communities; when the War ended, several thousand Vietnamese refugees were housed at Camp Pendleton, the huge Marine base just south of Orange County. Today, there is a Vietnamese woman who is one of the five Orange County Supervisors, and the area in Westminster called, officially, Little Saigon, remains a bastion of restaurants, night clubs, video stores and sometimes violent anti-Communism. The area also has a pretty serious gang problem. (Aoki understood the desire for consistency by many restaurant-goers; his Benihanas offered predictable and reliable food as well as the show, with the chef in Memphis, TN doing he same act and serving the same food as the one in Marina Del Rey, CA).
But boy, these Japanese and Vietnamese immigrants built some great restaurants, and many other businesses of all kinds.
My first trip to Japan was in 1979, and of course when got home I felt much more comfortable at the restaurants and clubs and with my new Vietnamese and Japanese neighbors. On one of my first visits to Japan, I was a bit surprised to see a Benihana Restaurant ... But unlike the Benihanas in California and Las Vegas (in the Las Vegas Hilton), this one had a strange name. It was called Benihana of New York. Then I started learning a little about Rocky Aoki. He'd named his first restaurant, in New York, Benihana of Tokyo. (Aoki's Benihana offshore race boat idles before the start of an event; offshore races are notoriously difficult to plan, race in, spectate and cover for journalists; helicopters shadow the best-known boats waiting for that "perfect" shot).
Sometime in my deepest past I was editor of a monthly newsprint publication called Race Boat and
Industry News. It was published on a shoestring by an older man, Chuck, and his younger wife, Dottie, and the wife seemed to really get along with the advertisers ... mostly young, rich males. Apart from having to hold their Nikon camera hostage to get one of my paychecks, it was a fun gig (until Chuck and Dottie lost their house and motorhome). We all spent a lot of time hanging-out at Parker, AZ, on the Colorado River, where ski boats and jet boats were the name of the game. The Long Beach Marina, just a few miles from my home, then in Santa Ana, CA, is still in operation, but the number of Blown Fuel Hydroplanes, which could attain speeds approaching 200 miles per hour on the "liquid 1/4-mile," are not what they used to be ... In fact, I'm not sure they even still have races of any kind there (neighbor complaints about the noise, naturally).
I also covered off-shore races, in the open ocean with boats of many different sizes and types, and at the time there was a big one off the coast of Orange County ... and Rocky Aoki was a well-known figure in the sport, one of the few "crossover" stars who raced the frighteningly powerful off-shore boats. The name Benihana was, naturally, emblazoned on the sides of the 38 foot race boat with inboard engines which Aoki piloted and a partner "throttled," (one person steers, another runs the engines in that class). Aoki also sponsored some of the sport's major events, called Benihana Grand Prixs, with the biggest one run in the 1970s off Pt. Pleasant, New Jersey.
Offshore power boat racing in those years was a bastion of the very- to the super-wealthy, much like Formula 1 racing in the 1960s and, to some extent, like sports car racing today. While almost all the best-known boats had sponsors, it was typical for one rich guy (always guys) to have a crew handle the maintenance and preparation and travel of the boat and team, and the owner would show up to steer or throttle the boat and buy drinks afterwards. Some of the boats were two-man, some three-man, a few had a crew of four, if I remember. These were not the famed Miss Budweiser-style hydroplanes with closed cabins and sponsons slapping through rough water and a wreck almost guaranteeing serious injury or worse. In these years and with these boats, there were all open to the elements using outboard or inboard or "jet" (impeller) power using huge V8 engines made for water use. Engines take a terrific pounding with use in the water, much more than they do in a race car. Talking with many of the engine-builders in the sport, I learned a lot about engines, inside and out. (Aoki in his offshore racing gear; Below, Speedway motorcycles, which well-known offshore racers Bruce Penhall and Dennis Sigalos competed on, Penhall winning several world championships, are single-cylinder 500cc machines which run on nitromethane and have no brakes, the bikes turned sideways on the oval dirt courses by putting one's left foot, which has a metal plate on it, on the ground and twisting the throttle hard; the same machines with metal-studded tires are used in ice racing events from Minnesota to Siberia).
On my KTLA/TV5 segment in Los Angeles, one morning I took a ride in an offshore boat piloted by Bruce Penhall and
throttled by Dennis Sigalos; both had been Speedway motorcycle champions and Penhall had been a star of the old NBC-TV series CHiPS, playing Officer Bruce Nelson for 18 episodes in 1982 and '83. He also has made more than a few soft-core movies of the late-night cable variety, usually involving some sort of crime which Penhall helps solve (or he's a spy) and a lot of topless women. Nice gig! Penhall's parents had both been killed in a plane crash while returning on a private jet from a skiing trip; the family company, Penhall Corporation, is a major road-building and maintenance contractor for the California freeway system, a familiar sight with their signature red and gray trucks. The business fell to Bruce Penhall and his brother. Their offshore racer was completely enclosed, with two bench seats, one behind the other, capable of holding four people total and each seat area enclosed in its own capsule system with parachutes in case of a crash. I rode in the back seat and screamed; Penhall and Sigalos got us up to well over 100mph off the coast of Long Beach, with the KTLA Telecopter keeping up with us at about 1,000 feet. What a morning! Maybe I deserved those Emmys more than I knew ...
This is all in the way of explaining how I came to meet Rocky Aoki, and to say that he was a tough, rugged, extremely intelligent and a very un-typical Japanese man, along the lines of Akio Morita, founder of Sony and Soichiro Honda, founder of that car company. He was original in his thoughts and actions; in the days when Aoki left Japan for NYC, that alone made him a maverick. Leaving your home country just wasn't done in 1960's Japan. But leave he did, worked hard, enjoyed great prosperity by creating a wonderful dining concept which has been copied, but never to the same high level as you'll find at any Benihana. His sporting exploits, on land, sea and in the air, made him a national hero in Japan, as famous if not more so than Yuichiro Miura, who in 1970 was The Man Who Skied Down Everest (if you haven't seen the movie, you really should; if you have, see it again).
Hiroaki Aoki was born Oct. 9, 1938. From an early age, he was familiar with the restaurant life; his parents owned a coffee shop, which later became a full-service restaurant, according to the Benihana Web site.
Aoki was a wrestler on the Japanese Olympic team, and discovered New York City on his way to the 1960 Games in Rome, where he could not compete because he was over the weight limit. He moved to the United States that fall.
He came to the United States when he was 19, and several years later he opened the first restaurant with $10,000 he had earned selling ice cream out of a truck. Within seven years, he had expanded his empire to 15 restaurants.
He resigned from the company in 1998 after learning that he was under investigation for insider trading. The next year, he pleaded guilty to charges that he had used an illegal tip to buy stock in Spectrum Information Technologies when he heard that John Sculley, then the chairman of Apple Computer, was negotiating to join the company. Mr. Aoki sold the shares after the appointment was announced, making hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was fined $500,000 and given three months’ probation.
Aoki was as theatrical as his restaurants. He raced boats, and flew in hot-air balloons. In July 1979, he
raced a 38-foot Cougar catamaran in his own race, the $50,000 Benihana Grand Prix offshore powerboat race near Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., and won. Later that summer, in San Francisco Bay, he had a near-fatal accident on a 38-foot powerboat. During a test run at 70 miles an hour, the boat lost its trim and dived into a wave. Aoki suffered a ruptured aorta, a lacerated liver and a leg broken in four places.
In September 1982, he was piloting a 35-foot Active Marine racer in the Kiekhaefer St. Augustine Classic in Florida. He suffered leg injuries when the boat, going 80 miles an hour, hit a swell and shattered. If the name Kiekhaefer is familiar to some readers, that's because Carl Kiekhaefer started and owned Mercury Marine and was one of the first big sponsors in a then still-new auto racing group called NASCAR, where his cars won two Grand National titles in the 1950s. Grand National was then the top series in NASCAR. He also raced in the 1952 and 1953 Carrera Panamericana Mexican Road Race, using Chryslers there as he did in NASCAR.
Aoki's love life is said to have been as tumultuous as his racing. He had six children by two women, and two of his children, Steven, a son of his first wife, Chizuru Kobayashi, and Echo, a daughter of Pamela Hilburger, who was his mistress while he was married to Ms. Kobayashi and later became his second wife, are the same age. Aoki’s third wife, Keiko Ono Aoki, survives him, along with all of his children, who include Grace, known as Kana; Kevin; Kyle and Devon. There will be a quiz on this later, so please study.
Rocky Aoki was Rocky before Stallone, and, like that other Rocky, created some magic which people around the world will enjoy for many years to come. (Aoki and friends open a Benihana Restaurant with a traditional Japanese rice-beating ceremony in 2001).
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