Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto may be known for his prowess in televised culinary battles,
but there's so much more to this chef than his entertainment career. Here's what you
don't know about Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto.
Many American fans know Morimoto best for his days on Iron Chef and Iron Chef America,
but it turns out he had a competitive spirit long before he became a chef. As a child,
Morimoto aspired to be a professional baseball player. He grew up a big fan of his hometown
team, the Hiroshima Carps, and played ball in high school. He was a catcher, and apparently
pretty talented — he almost went pro, before he suffered a broken shoulder that ended his
career and eventually shifted his focus to the culinary world. However, he remains a
baseball fan to this day. He even threw the first pitch at a Tigers-White Sox game in 2013.
"Nice velocity."
"Sounded like it."
Masaharu Morimoto is famous for his food, but he's done a fair amount of collaboration
with the beverage industry, too. Chef Morimoto has helped create two different ranges of
sake. The first is Easy Cup, a Yamadanishiki Junma Premium Sake made for casual drinking
that's served in a glass bottle with an easily resealable plastic lid.
On the higher end, he's collaborated with the historic Fukumitsuya Brewery, founded
in 1625 during Japan's Edo period. They offer Morimoto Junmai, Morimoto Junmai Gingjo, and
Morimoto Junmai Daiginjo sake. A deluxe Morimoto Junmai Aged sake is available at 5, 10, or
30+ years aged.
Morimoto also has a restaurant called Momosan which focuses on ramen and sake. For beer,
Morimoto paired with Rogue Ales to create three varieties: Morimoto Imperial Pilsner,
Morimoto Black Obi Soba Ale, and Morimoto Soba Ale. Most recently, he's teamed up with
Michael Mondavi to create a Cabernet Sauvignon that's sold in his restaurants.
He may have started small, with his own cafe in Japan, but these days Masaharu Morimoto
has restaurants all over the world.
The first Morimoto restaurant opened in 2001 in Philadelphia, followed by Wasabi by Morimoto
at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai in 2004, which to this day is still considered one
of the best restaurants in all of Asia.
These days, he has 15 restaurants all around the world, and he's not slowing down. Several
of them have even won awards. Morimoto New York won a James Beard Foundation Award for
"Outstanding Restaurant Design," and Morimoto Napa was named one of the "Best US Restaurant
Openings" in 2010 by Food & Wine.
Branching out from haute Japanese cuisine, Morimoto opened his first ramen restaurant,
Momosan, in New York in 2016, and a second Momosan opened up in Waikiki in 2017. The
chef has also said he's considering opening a ramen spot in Las Vegas, after seeing how
popular it is at his New York eatery.
Before he opened his own restaurant in the United States, Morimoto got a job working
at the world-famous Nobu in New York City. It was quite the place to hone his skills.
Not only did the restaurant win the James Beard Foundation's Best New Restaurant Award
when it opened in 1995, but chef Nobu Matsuhisa himself was nominated for a James Beard Award
for Outstanding Chef nine times between 1997-2006.
Morimoto says that working at Nobu changed the way he thought of the restaurant industry.
He told Orlando Weekly,
"Before I worked at Nobu, I had thought the sushi chef was the center of the restaurant.
However, working at Nobu, I learned that the customers are everything. Our job is to make
them happy."
Because Chef Matsuhisa had a second restaurant in Los Angeles, he was often absent from the
New York location. This gave Morimoto a chance to shine. After winning a three-star review
in The New York Times, Morimoto promoted himself to executive chef, getting an embroidered
chef's jacket and new business cards. Five years later, he left Nobu in 1999 to pursue
his own restaurant.
Though Americans might best recognize Masaharu Morimoto from Iron Chef America on Food Network,
he actually got his start in food television on the original Japanese version of the show.
Even then, he wasn't sure if he even wanted to be on television.
"Morimoto. The Iron Chef. One of the titans in the culinary world."
He cooked for a group of people one night, not knowing one of them was a judge on Iron
Chef Japan. A few months later he got a call and was invited to perform on the show, but
he declined, thinking it would be too much pressure. After encouragement from his friends,
he finally accepted, and ended up winning his first battle. For the next two years,
he would fly back and forth between Japan and the US to compete.
Even after many competitions, Morimoto says it never gets less nerve-wracking to do battle.
He told Haute Living,
"I still get nervous every time. It will always be a challenge to use surprise ingredients,
no matter how prepared you think you are."
He may be the most famous chef in the family, but according to Masaharu Morimoto, his wife
is a great cook too. When asked in an interview, "Who's the most underrated chef working in
the business today?" Morimoto replied, simply, "My wife."
Morimoto prefers not to cook at home, since it's what he does all day at work, though
he did say that he'll sometimes dream up new dishes and work on presentation at home. But
for the most part, his wife, Keiko, is in charge.
Her specialties include traditional Japanese vegetable and root vegetable dishes. Morimoto
has said that he eats mostly vegetarian at home, though he'll occasionally have some
simply steamed chicken.
Some of his favorite healthy Japanese comfort food dishes include tofu, dried seaweed, and
root veggies that Keiko prepares for him in a variety of ways, including simmered nimono,
steamed mushimono, aemono, or marinated salad, and baked yakimono.
When he's not at home with his wife to cook for him, Masaharu Morimoto sticks to a strict
eating schedule. Instead of sitting down to three well-rounded meals a day, the chef eats
just one large meal. He insists that it's enough for him.
Between 3 and 5 p.m., he'll indulge in a big meal often consisting of Japanese favorites
like ramen, sauteed vegetables, meal or fish, and rice. And if he's traveling, forget about
it — he doesn't eat at all.
He may be on to something. There's a fair amount of scientific evidence that intermittent
fasting can be beneficial to metabolic health. Likewise, other studies show that abstaining
from eating on planes might be one of the most effective ways to combat jet lag.
You may think that a chef who has traveled the world and has restaurants in countries
scattered across the globe might have some exotic food or luxury item as his favorite
ingredient, but not Morimoto. His favorite ingredient is rice.
Rice is a staple food in Japan, and at one time was even used as currency in the country.
The Japanese word for rice—gohan—is synonymous with the word meal, so important is it to
the country's cuisine.
Morimoto recognizes the importance of rice in his restaurants, making time to ensure
that each grain is of the highest quality. At every one of Morimoto's restaurants, they
polish the rice on site, so it's as fresh as possible when it reaches your plate. He
told Napa Valley Life,
"We take brown rice and polish it ourselves each day. It has a better, sweeter flavor
and it doesn't sit in a warehouse in a bag for three or four months."
Some say that you're never too old to go back to college or opt for major life changes to
chase your dreams, and Morimoto is living proof of that. According to The Japan Times,
he lived in Hiroshima until he was 30 years old — and, more than that, he had a series
of small businesses there, ones that he left behind in order to go to the U.S.
He was working at a friend's sushi restaurant, but somehow, he still found the time to run
a small kissaten. According to Culture Trip, that's essentially a coffee house, but they're
definitely not your average Starbucks. They're based on old-school tea houses, but as a nod
to a time when there was an increasing obsession with Western culture, they serve coffee. Still,
they're typically small, dimly lit, quiet, and comfortable: a place where you can go
and enjoy a friendly cup of coffee in a coy, quiet atmosphere.
"Congratulations! World's best cup of coffee! Great job everybody! It's great to meet you!"
At the same time, he and his wife were also running an insurance agency, along with a
newspaper delivery business. The ability to juggle so many jobs at once might be what
made him so adept at juggling all the responsibilities of his now-global empire.
While you might expect an award-winning chef to always know that food was his passion,
that wasn't the case with Morimoto. When Orlando Weekly asked him what his earliest memory
of food was, he gave this surprising response:
"I played sports, so I was always hungry. My memory comes not about a particular piece
of delicious food; rather, just trying to get full. To me, food was all about quantity
rather than quality when I was young."
Over the years, he says his attitude toward food has changed quite a bit, starting with
his job at Nobu. There, he says, he learned that he'd been wrong, and cooking wasn't about
the chef at all. Instead, it was about making the customer happy.
One of the ways he wants to do that is by making Japanese cuisine more accessible to
people who might hesitate at trying a food like sushi. To that end, he's made tuna pizza
one of his signature dishes. He told Hotelier,
"You know tuna and you know pizza. [...] You don't even know what's it in but you eat it,
and afterwards, you ask what's in it."
Everyone has to start somewhere, and in Morimoto's case, his apprenticeship wasn't just about
learning all the tricks of the trade, it was about learning a lot about patience, too.
When he talked to The Daily Meal and they asked him about his very first job in the
industry, he responded that it was as a sushi chef. Sounds impressive, but he quickly clarified:
"Of course, I started as an apprentice. The owner of the restaurant wouldn't let me touch
fish for the first year or so. First, I had to learn basics, such as cleaning, serving
customers, chopping scallions, washing rice, etc."
When Orlando Weekly asked him what advice he had for the sushi chefs that were just
getting started, he said that background and the history are important.
"My knife is very sharp, and very expensive. I can give it to you, but you can't make sushi.
You need the proper technique — it's also important — but the difference is having
the skill in the mind, heart, and body."
Even the pros cut themselves occasionally, get burned on a hot surface, or break some
dishes, so what's Morimoto's worst — and most memorable injury?
He told Orlando Weekly that it happened when he was filming an episode of the Japanese
version of Iron Chef. He was working with monkfish, and had to reach into a barrel,
grab a live fish, and turn that into a dish. The fish absolutely hadn't signed up for any
of it, and when he tried to cut into it, it bit him. He added,
"There was a lot of blood while we were taping the show. We weren't live. But it kept bleeding,
so I wrapped a towel around my hand and tried to hide it while taping the show."
That's not the only time a particularly dangerous food ingredient injured Morimoto, either.
He told The Daily Meal that chilli peppers were once a secret ingredient in one of his
Iron Chef competitions. He admitted that he had a really tough time with that particular
secret ingredient, noting
"I had a hard time because I rarely used them in my cooking. Trying to taste a pepper during
the battle, I bit it and burned my tongue with the heat!"
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