- I had moved to Chicago,
and then I was like talking to people
and I'm like, yeah, what's, what's going on
with teriyaki out here?
And they're like what
are you talking about (laughs)?
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
It was like this like Larry David-style
showdown where you're just like,
you know, like, squinting at each other
and hoping the music starts, you know?
(upbeat music)
- Teriyaki: sweet! Sticky! Born
in Japan, but perfected here, in Seattle.
(upbeat music)
That's right, the thick, saccharine grilling glaze
that you know and love
is only nominally a Japanese creation.
Modern teriyaki was pioneered in Seattle in the '70s,
and for decades it thrived
as this city's cheap, quick
alternative to franchise fast food.
But times are changing in the Emerald City.
Skyscrapers are going up,
new people are moving in,
and, over the last 10 years,
over a third of the city's iconic
teriyaki shops have closed; why?
Can teriyaki, the go-to budget eats
of Seattle's grungy past,
survive in the city's glossy future?
(upbeat music)
We're here to find out.
(loud chattering)
(upbeat music)
In 2016, Thrillist published a piece
by award-winning food journalist Naomi Tomky
that highlighted a grim trend in Seattle's food scene.
All over town, venerable teriyaki shops,
tiny neon gems in the fabric of the city's
robust neighborhoods were closing for good.
We stopped by her place for a cup of coffee
and a primer on Seattle's
present-day teriyaki situation.
- I was born and raised in Seattle,
and I love teriyaki, and grew up eating it all the time.
The piece wasn't originally gonna be about
the death of teriyaki,
it was just I wanted to write about Seattle teriyaki
and why it mattered
and why it was meaningful.
I think Seattleites, well, people
born and raised here, will
always look for
teriyaki and it will always be
a comfort food for them.
So, Toshi opened the first shop
in 1976, on Queen Anne.
He got himself a rice cooker
and developed this chicken recipe
There was nothing like it before that.
(upbeat music)
- I wanted to keep it small, simple.
I started serving teriyaki chickens
with reasonable prices so
people can eat it more often.
- People were really into it,
people were buying it
and he ended up expanding
and franchising, and, at one point,
he had 17 restaurants.
There are still so many restaurants that are
all versions of Toshi's teriyaki,
Toshio's teriyaki, Yoshi's, and
who even knows what
is connected to him.
- I know there are so many teriyaki places now
but I feel we do a good job.
(upbeat music)
- teriyaki in Japan, is this sort of this
light sauce brushed on after
seafood or something similar is cooked
and I don't know anything about that version of teriyaki.
Seattle teriyaki is this sort of heavy,
almost cloyingly sweet sauce and it's marinated.
It's the least complicated
most like mundane thing.
Like the teriyaki shops.
It's not exciting in and of itself.
- Yeah.
- But it's sort of a staple thing.
(serene music)
Knute Berger, who's sort of a
elder statesman of the Seattle media world,
had this great line in the New York Times article
where he says, Seattle teriyaki is so ubiquitous
as to be invisible.
And that really stuck with me because
teriyaki is always these little,
tiny shops often immigrant-run.
You have the locals,
who have been eating it their whole lives
and don't even realize it's just a Seattle thing,
and then you have the newcomers, who,
it's, they, they really don't see it.
It, it just doesn't, doesn't show up.
It doesn't scan and when something
so ubiquitous as to be invisible.
- Yeah. - As he says, you don't
notice when it's disappearing
because you weren't noticing it.
- Sometimes people in a hurry
but I do take time
to make it good, taste good.
(serene music)
- Does Toshi still cook in Seattle now?
- So he's up in Mill Creek,
which is about 25 minutes outside the city.
He's got this place that's
basically a throwback to the original one,
just a tiny little place
with him and his wife and one other employee
and they serve the, the classic teriyaki chicken,
and not a whole lot else.
- When I was growing up in Japan,
that was maybe 10 years old,
I used to catch fish,
put them on the skewers.
I made my own sauce, teriyaki sauce.
(upbeat music)
My sauce is a little bit different.
Not necessary to use that much wine and sweet wine.
That keeps it, we can keep prices down.
When I started the first restaurant in,
by Seattle Center, I made it
affordable so people can eat almost every day.
(upbeat music)
I kinda like to concentrate on chicken thighs.
I do add some ginger and fresh garlic.
Marinate it in a teriyaki sauce overnight.
That's my story; maybe I was hungry (laughs).
(upbeat music)
- Can you envision Seattle without teriyaki?
I mean, one of the things. - No.
- Is like this idea.
- Like what's quintessential Seattle?
It's not the, the, the chef doing
the [omitted] cedar plank salmon.
It's more the teriyaki place.
- Eric Rivera is a world-traveled chef
born and raised in the Pacific Northwest.
After gigs at Noma and Alinea,
he came came back to Seattle to open addo.,
a private dinner club where he pushes
physical and symbolic boundaries of his meals.
(serene music)
He represents a version of Seattle's culinary future
but when he's off the clock
his taste buds keep bringing him back
to his childhood favorite: teriyaki chicken.
(upbeat music)
You come from a world where like balance.
- And the idea of like. - Yeah.
Constructing menus and constructing recipes
is very much like front of mind.
- So you're mapping it out like this.
You're looking at cold,
you're looking a little bit hot,
more room temp, you're looking at something like
a little bit more sweet and sour.
I have like little bits and pieces here
and I go, crunchy,
I go more soft, and, then I go,
some of it's a little bit more grilled
so I get a little bit, you know,
color on there. - Right.
- Caramelization, you know, grill marks,
and then I get in the inside, I'm like,
little bit of, you know, dark meat
which is nice but I mix it up with a
little bit of the lighter meat.
- This is what you're describing like
this is like the perfect piece of teriyaki chicken.
- It really is, you know what I mean?
And that's, that's pretty (beep) cool.
(upbeat music)
- Can you improve teriyaki?
Like could, you think you can?
- You know, I'm, I'm a Puerto Rican kid.
Where's my get-in for that?
I can put, you know, a Jidori chicken on this
and (chuckles), you know, I can
pull A5 Wagyu and go, here's
your $450 teriyaki. - Right, right.
- But does that defeat the purpose
of what we're trying to do here?
- Right. - And what makes it special?
- Yeah.
- It's $8.25. - Yeah.
- (laughs) You can't beat this,
you can't beat this.
- I mean it's like almost a perfect meal.
(serene music)
- Two places that were
very meaningful to me closed
or announced their closing like
as I, as we were discussing this piece.
Then I started looking at it
and running some numbers as best I could
and I found it was about
a third were gone and I was like
now I have to like go explore what happened.
- Yeah.
- It just, it's hard to be in any small
business, in Seattle, where you're trying
to hold real estate in a town that has the
fastest-growing housing market in the country.
- And, also, two big tech titans that are hiring
more people by the day.
- Like 60% of people in Seattle
moved here from somewhere else
and a lot of that is recent.
It comes in Styrofoam,
which is interesting because Seattle's
outlawed Styrofoam for many years now (laughs).
- Yeah, we're just gonna keep doing that.
- Just since I've written this article,
I've had Seattleites come to me and say,
oh my gosh, this is a thing that's disappearing.
Like I love teriyaki.
I grew up eating that.
We can't let that happen.
(upbeat music)
- But if Seattleites don't wanna let
teriyaki disappear on their watch,
they'll need to talk openly about how
it fits into their changing city.
So we called up some locals do just that
over beers at Fremont Brewing's Urban Beer Garden.
- I'm Nancy Leson; I'm the
food commentator for KNKX Radio,
and I was the longtime restaurant critic
and food writer for the Seattle Times.
- Eula Scott Bynoe and I host
a local podcast called Hella Black Hella Seattle,
and, so, our main goal is to like,
you know, help people of color get out
and be more, you know, involved in Seattle.
We have such dollar-value
that we wanna spend places
but we don't know how, sometimes.
- My name's, Shota Nakajima.
I'm the chef/owner of Adana.
I was born in Japan,
I moved to Seattle when I was in elementary school.
I grew up with Toshi's son,
like their whole family, we’re good family friends.
- I was a waitress for a long time
and I worked at a restaurant at Green Lake.
Before I get to work, I go around the corner
to Toshi's and, for, I mean,
at the time it was like $4.50. - Right.
- You can get this enormous
thing of teriyaki and rice.
Sometimes we were just like,
two of us, would share it.
(upbeat music)
- Once you get into high school here,
like, it's like lunch.
You know what I mean?
So you're going all the time.
Like our black, like, like food is teriyaki.
It's so affordable, you get so much food for it.
- You guys feel like in Seattle, in 2017,
that holds up; is teriyaki. - No.
- Still what Seattle is?
- I don't think so.
Seattle used to be a really small town, really small town.
And as the transplants come in with their,
with their added wealth,
they don't really need to spend like $5.00 on a plate
when they have, you know,
$45 like a, budgeted for the meal.
- People are more careful
about what they're eating.
It's just not the
sustainably raised organic chicken.
- That free and. - Right.
- With the way people eat now
where they want every plate to be like a foodie
picturesque thing, like and teriyaki is like,
it's chicken with sauce on top
and like on top of rice. - Yeah.
- And like really sweet, you know,
for some people, who are like,
oh, it's just so, so sweet, it's like.
- Can you (mumbles)? - That's the point.
- Yeah. - Like it's, it's like this,
you know, it's a weird sweet/savory thing.
(upbeat music)
- I guess 'cause I'm a restaurateur
and I own the restaurant
and I'm Japanese, I feel like sometimes
the trend goes to like
authentic Japanese food and that's kinda
what I was focusing on two years ago
but, with any kind of food,
any kind of culture, everything evolves but,
for me, like teriyaki in Seattle it's just
supposed to be there
in like a weird, weird conscious.
(upbeat music)
- Do you guys think that teriyaki
has a place in Seattle's future?
- Maybe, maybe; I'm not sure.
- Our immigrant populations are
coming largely from Asia,
and I think we're always gonna have teriyaki somewhere.
- Yeah.
- I lived in Japan.
I like went to a few different cities
but, you know, I come back here
and there's teriyaki and it's one
of those like comforting things that I see.
- I mean, it's our cheap eats.
It's our cultural cheap eats.
It's the one thing that like,
you know, feels very unique to us.
It's important, I think, to have things that make you
feel like your place
is different from other places
because of the way everything
is becoming more similar, you know?
(upbeat music)
- I think it's here to stay
in the Pacific Northwest.
Whether or not they can afford to stay
in Seattle proper is yet to be seen.
You can't put that kind of thing back
in the box once it's,
once it's been created.
- If teriyaki won't go back in the box,
where will it go?
Seattle's transforming too fast
to say with certainty but
in the midst of change, a small
constant can be a big comfort and
to some Seattleites, that's what
teriyaki's been all along.
(upbeat music)