Shota Nakajima is Opening a Teriyaki Restaurant in Cle Elum

Shota Nakajima is opening his consider on a teriyaki restaurant — influenced by flavors he grew up eating in Seattle and Japan — at the conclusion of March. The cafe, with 38 indoor seats and rooftop bar that fits 90, is in Cle Elum, just about 100 miles east of Seattle by automobile.

Banzai Teriyaki will serve dishes using Nakajima’s signature teriyaki sauce, which released in December and can be located at stores like Uwajimaya. The bottled sauce is a twist on the teriyaki sauce he cherished as a baby in Seattle, with jolts of umami from components like nutritional yeast and hints of toastiness from sesame paste.

For Nakajima, teriyaki is a sentimental meals. He grew up with the kids of Toshi Kasahara, the guy credited with inventing Seattle teriyaki. On days off from school or right after baseball games, Nakajima would consume at Toshi’s Teriyaki Grill, noting that he skipped the restaurant’s flavors even though researching cooking in Japan. Seattle’s variation of the charbroiled chicken dish with sweet soy sauce is Japanese in identify only the teriyaki diners eat in Japan is significantly a lot less sweet and saucy, and the standard for Seattle teriyaki was shaped by Korean cafe entrepreneurs like John Chung soon after Kasahara began the style.

“When I went to Japan, actually one of the initially points I did when I arrived back was to go to Toshi’s Teriyaki because it feels like Seattle to me,” Nakajima suggests.

Banzai Teriyaki

This is Nakajima’s third cafe project in the Seattle spot. He opened Taku, a preferred Capitol Hill restaurant targeted on karaage, in March 2020, and shut his Japanese restaurant Adana in May perhaps of that yr. Adana was initially Naka, which was 1 of Seattle’s only kaiseki eating places. Nakajima was a finalist in the 18th period of Top Chef, which wrapped up in July of very last 12 months.

Nakajima is also serving Japanese dishes not ordinarily found at Seattle-region teriyaki eating places like duck spring rolls, tempura prawns, wings, and fried cauliflower miso hummus, and the restaurant will have a comprehensive bar, a cocktail list, and 16 beers on faucet.

Banzai Teriyaki is a partnership with Eric Bolstad, a mortgage broker who splits his time in between Cle Elum and Bellevue. Bolstad was initially preparing on opening the cafe on his have and tapped Nakajima for consulting enable soon after looking at him beat star chef Bobby Flay on a 2018 episode of the Food stuff Network’s Conquer Bobby Flay.

Nevertheless the foods at Banzai teriyaki will be additional Seattle-Japanese than Kansai, Nakajima states the decor will be “Osaka in your face.”

Shogo Ota of Tireman Studio, who created Taku’s logos, will paint murals on the partitions of the eating space. Nakajima suggests 1 will be of the “streets of Japan,” and a further will be a collage of anime people like Pikachu. “It’s brilliant. It is energetic,” Nakajima suggests. “I want individuals to walk in and be like, ‘Whoa I feel like I’m in Japan. What is this location?”’

Nakajima is fired up to invest far more time in Cle Elum, a town he’s frequented routinely when mushroom foraging and camping in nearby forests. He designs on doing the job consistently at the restaurant and running its culinary operations, although the restaurant will have an executive chef who will be declared shortly.

Banzai Teriyaki will be a departure from the community teriyaki places Nakajima grew up with, but he respects the creators of the genre. “One-hundred % nod to Toshi’s Teriyaki,” Nakajima claims. “If I didn’t expand up with his young ones, I would not be as sentimental about teriyaki rooster.”