The Document Problem
This piece was supposed to open on a single dated primary document: a menu, a price board, a lease, a payroll record from Toshi’s Teriyaki at 372 Roy Street. That document has not surfaced in the available record. What survives instead is a cluster of secondary accounts — a 2007 Seattle Weekly feature by Jonathan Kauffman, a HistoryLink essay drawing on an author interview with Toshihiro Kasahara, and two Seattle Times pieces from 1992 and 1996 — that agree on some facts and disagree on others. The honest way to write this history is to say so up front, then read what the accounts do record.
The disagreement matters. The Seattle Weekly and HistoryLink both date the opening to March 2, 1976. The 1992 and 1996 Seattle Times pieces say 1977. Until a lease, a business license, or a health permit is pulled from the Seattle or King County archives, neither date should be treated as settled. What follows uses 1976 as the working date because two independent accounts give it, and flags the conflict rather than resolving it by assertion.
What the Counter Was
According to the Seattle Weekly account, Kasahara opened Toshi’s Teriyaki Restaurant at 372 Roy St. on Lower Queen Anne with 30 seats and five menu items: teriyaki chicken, teriyaki beef, and tori udon served all day, plus teriyaki steak and Japanese-style chicken curry at dinner. A chicken teriyaki plate, including sales tax, cost $1.85; a chicken-beef combo ran $2.10. Each plate came with white rice packed into a scalloped mold Kasahara imported from Japan, and a cabbage salad dressed with sesame oil and rice-wine vinegar.
HistoryLink adds a detail that reframes the whole enterprise: the shop was not a restaurant building. Kasahara recalled that it was “a house actually owned by the next-door Chinese restaurant, and they lived upstairs and they wanted to lease the bottom part. So that’s how I started.” The first Toshi’s was a ground-floor lease in someone else’s house, sublet from a neighboring Chinese restaurant family. That is the capital structure of an immigrant food business in one sentence — not a storefront purchase, but a sublease on the bottom floor of a building whose owners lived above the shop.
The cooking method, as Kasahara described it to the Weekly, was skewer-based: “I made teriyaki sauce and put chicken or beef on skewers. I broiled them, then dipped them in sauce, and went back and forth into the oven.” The sauce was soy, sugar, and chicken juices. Kasahara told the Weekly he could not say what inspired the sugar-for-mirin substitution — possibly Hawaii, more likely cost. HistoryLink is careful to note that Hawaiian Japanese communities had already developed a sweeter sauce with sugar, garlic, ginger, and pineapple, and that Kikkoman launched a bottled teriyaki sauce in the U.S. in 1961. The sugar-soy glaze was not invented at 372 Roy St. It was assembled there at a price.
The Review as a Labor Event
In July 1976, Seattle Times restaurant critic John Hinterberger reviewed Toshi’s. The Weekly reports that the review “made the business,” and that Kasahara was subsequently able to hire more people and cut his hours from six days a week to five. HistoryLink, drawing on the same review, quotes Hinterberger on the meat — “The trick is to get the meat tender without being half raw and cooked without turning rubbery. Toshi does the trick” — and on the rice, which he called “a staple of such historic necessity that to leave a single grain in the bowl is considered an insult close to sacrilege.”
Read as a labor document rather than a taste document, the review is a demand shock. The clearest evidence of what that shock did to the counter comes from the second shop. In 1980 Kasahara opened a strictly takeout Toshi’s in Greenlake, specializing in a teriyaki half-chicken with molded rice, cabbage salad, and pickles for $2. Yasuko Conner, the first employee at that shop, described the lunch rush to the Weekly: before a March 1981 Hinterberger article, “one day for lunch we would do 40 orders at best.” After it, “out of 300 customers, I would only notice two or three. I would never have time to look up.”
That is the sentence to sit with. A critic’s column converted a 40-order lunch into a 300-customer lunch, and the people absorbing that conversion were Conner and her co-workers, packing rice and chopping cabbage at a pace set by a newspaper. The review is usually filed under reputation. It belongs under staffing and pacing.
The Business Model, Not the Recipe
The Weekly documents Kasahara’s growth pattern precisely: he “began leapfrogging restaurants, selling one Toshi’s Teriyaki and using the funds from the sale to open a new one — rarely owning more than two restaurants at a time.” After Greenlake came Ballard, then Aurora near 145th, then Lynnwood, Bellevue, Kirkland, and Greenlake again. The Lower Queen Anne store was sold to a former manager; the Greenlake store went to Conner, who renamed it Yasuko’s Teriyaki and at her peak owned nine.
This is a distinct growth strategy from franchising, and it distributes a cuisine’s know-how rather than concentrating it. Each sale put a trained operator — often a former employee — into independent ownership. When Kasahara later did franchise, the Weekly reports he sold more than 15 licenses at $10,000 apiece, including three to four weeks of recipe instruction, with 3 percent royalties. The franchise phase came after the leapfrog phase, and the leapfrog phase is the one that scattered the format across the region.
The name itself escaped. Kasahara sold the Aurora branch to a man named K.B. Chang and, per the Weekly, inadvertently sold the Toshi’s name with it, because the contract did not prohibit Chang from opening other stores under it. Chang opened five or six Toshi’s in the late 1980s; Kasahara settled with him in the early 1990s to reclaim sole rights. By then “Toshi’s” had become closer to a category than a brand — which is part of why the format spread faster than any single owner could control.
The Korean Phase Is the Spine
Most histories of Seattle teriyaki treat the Korean-owned shops as a later influence on a Japanese-origin story. The documents support a stronger claim. HistoryLink, drawing on an interview with Howard Chung, states that “the majority of teriyaki restaurants in Seattle were Korean-owned,” and quotes Chung directly: “The Seattle teriyaki story is almost a Korean immigration story, more so than anything.” A 1996 Seattle Times piece by Judith Blake reported that “more Koreans than any other group are thought to own teriyaki restaurants.” The 1992 Times piece by Elizabeth Rhodes listed King County teriyaki names that were Korean, Thai, Chinese, Hawaiian, and plain American, and quoted a Health Department official crediting Kasahara with starting the trend while noting the boom had branched out well beyond its origin.
The Chung family’s trajectory is the documented case. HistoryLink records that the Chungs moved to the Seattle area from Los Angeles, where they had sold Korean bulgogi sandwiches — French rolls with teriyaki chicken — to industrial workers at lunchtime. John Chung’s goal was seminary, not restaurants; the family bought a sandwich shop in 1981 and worked through a series of them. In Tukwila, in a district of industrial and manufacturing employers, they began offering teriyaki chicken and meat with rice alongside the sandwiches. Howard Chung described the shift: “you got a sandwich option, and then you got a rice plate option … And I remember, like, that’s where it’s just all of a sudden, it was like 50/50, sandwiches and over rice, and over the next, what, two years, this place became so busy.”
The sauce was made in vats — equal parts white sugar, water, and soy sauce, later with chicken stock, ginger powder, and jalapeno — and Chung described the boil as a thing that had to be watched: “if it boils, I mean, it’s disaster, because it goes over the side.” The Chungs mentored other Korean entrepreneurs through the Korean Presbyterian Church in Seattle; Howard Chung recalled congregation members learning and working in the business, and said that Korean owners incorporated teriyaki because the marinade ingredients were already familiar home cooking. “We know how to make all this,” he said. “This is, like, what we make at home anyway.”
That is the labor system in plain terms: a format learned in one family, taught through a church network, and replicated by people who already cooked with soy, sugar, and ginger at home. The Japanese-origin chapter opens the story. The Korean chapter is what made the format a citywide working lunch.
Counting the Working Lunch
The counts are the weakest part of the record and should be handled as such. In 1992, the Seattle Times reported that a Health Department computer query found 107 King County eateries with the word “teriyaki” in their name — a count that excludes shops selling teriyaki under other names. In 1996, the same paper reported about 175 King County teriyaki eateries per the Restaurant Association of the State of Washington, and noted that most had only a few Formica-topped tables and that a large share were takeout. In 2007, the Weekly reported the Washington Restaurant Association database held 519 teriyaki-named listings statewide, with more than 100 inside Seattle city limits. These are three different bodies using three different naming criteria. They show direction, not a comparable series.
HistoryLink records the reversal: Seattle’s teriyaki restaurants declined from more than 80 in 2010 to about 67 in 2025, with tech-sector growth pushing up rent and property taxes. Yasuko’s on Broadway, Conner’s shop, closed in 2016 after 20 years. The 1996 Times piece put a typical meal at about $4 to $6; the 2007 Weekly piece described a $5.99 chicken special taped to a cash register. A cheap lunch is an urban infrastructure claim, and when rents rise, what closes is not only a restaurant but a price point — the one that served the Tukwila manufacturing worker and the Frontier Packaging employee on her lunch break whom the 1992 Times quoted. The documents record the closures. They do not record where those workers ate next.
What the Record Does Not Show
The single-document method this publication uses would want a menu, a lease, or a payroll record from 372 Roy St. None has been retrieved. The available accounts are journalism and an author interview, and they conflict on the opening year. They also leave the kitchen staff largely unnamed: Conner is documented as the first employee of the second shop, and the Chungs’ church network is described in general terms, but the people who packed rice and chopped cabbage at the first counter are not in the record under their own names. That absence is itself a finding. The history of a working lunch is usually written from the owner’s side of the counter, because the owner is the one who gets interviewed.
Until the primary documents surface, the defensible claim is narrower than the legend: a subleased ground floor on Roy Street, a five-item menu, a $1.85 plate, a critic’s review that multiplied demand, a resale-and-reopen model that scattered the format, and a Korean-owned phase that the interviewees themselves describe as the main event. The rest waits on the archives.
Questions Readers Ask
When did Toshi’s actually open?
The Seattle Weekly (2007) and HistoryLink give March 2, 1976. The Seattle Times pieces from 1992 and 1996 say 1977. The conflict is unresolved in the available sources; a business license or lease from the Seattle or King County archives would settle it.
Did Kasahara invent teriyaki sauce?
No account supports that. The Weekly reports he could not say what inspired the sugar-for-mirin substitution, and HistoryLink documents earlier Hawaiian and bottled Kikkoman precedents. What Toshi’s did was assemble a cheap, fast version at a specific price.
Why did Korean owners become central to Seattle teriyaki?
HistoryLink, citing Howard Chung, reports that the majority of Seattle teriyaki restaurants were Korean-owned, that the Chungs converted a sandwich shop in Tukwila to rice plates, and that church networks spread the format. Chung’s own framing is that the Seattle teriyaki story is “almost a Korean immigration story.”
Where can I look for primary documents?
The Seattle Municipal Archives and King County Archives hold business licenses and related records; the National Archives holds census schedules through 1950. A 1976 lease or health permit would be the document this history most needs.