The legend of Hiroaki “Rocky” Aoki begins in 1942 in Tokyo, when Rocky is eight and US warplanes start bombing his city, which they continue to do routinely for the next three years.
On March 9, 1945, when Rocky is eleven, 279 American B-29s drop 1,665 tons of napalm, jelled-gasoline, and white-phosphorous bombs on Toyko, centered on its densely populated working-class area near the docks. 16 square miles of the city are destroyed and 100,000 people are killed.
Somewhere along the way, Rocky’s father Yanosuki comes upon a blazing red safflower, a benihana, peeking out from rubble, and sees a brighter day ahead.
From a young age, Rocky emerges as a star multi-sport athlete. But he gets expelled from his Japanese university for fighting. So he opens a new chapter in his life. He comes to America, moves to western Massachusetts, enrolls in Springfield College on a wrestling scholarship, and goes on to become the father of the world’s eatertainment industry.
Wes Schlagenhauf, an Aoki historian, retells a legend that’s up there with the greatest of American entrepreneurial sagas. It starts on the streets of Harlem, where Rocky turns an ice-cream truck into a four-table stir-fried meat cart. The genre is loosely based on the cook-at-the-table teppanyaki style in Japan, but the flavors are Americanized (bland, tender cuts of beef, chicken and shrimp drowned in soy sauce and butter) and the service gets hammed up (at Yanosuki’s urging) for an entertainment-hungry audience of early-1960s American urbanites who are already gaga for Crêpes Suzette, Baked Alaska and Bananas Foster.
Rocky doesn’t know how to cook anything more than French toast himself, but he hires and trains a precision corps of knife-flipping, egg-slicing, fire-breathing chefs that wow diners and turn their meal into a full-on dinner show. In 1964, Benihana opens a permanent location in Manhattan. Before long, Muhammad Ali and Sean Connery are customers, and Rocky opens Benihana branches in LA, Honolulu and other US cities. Kids love it. Asian immigrants open Behihana knockoffs all over suburban America.
Meanwhile, Rocky is living his best life. He starts an adult magazine that advertises “two centerfolds for the price of one.” He launches a yacht race called the ”Benihana Grand Prix,” which he wins with a 38-foot catamaran. He pilots the longest hot-air-balloon trip in world history, which ends with a crash landing in California. He almost dies in a boating accident, his wife and mistress both show up at the hospital. Then come the insider trading convictions, the failed nightclubs, the epic coke binges, and the descent into madness.
I have been a devotee of Rocky Aoki’s American interpretation of teppanyaki cooking, more often referred to as “hibachi,” for as long as I can remember going to restaurants. But for my whole childhood, I hadn’t even heard of Benihana. I had only heard of Goten, in Sunderland: it was where my sister Rosie and I would beg our parents to take us for our birthdays, because it was the most fun a kid could possibly have at a restaurant.
The first thing you’ll notice at Goten is the table or two in the back of the warmly lit series of rooms, full of a bunch of students from nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst, celebrating a birthday. They are inevitably having a great time, and it’s not just because of the sake that’s being streamed down their throats by a friendly chef in between aerobatic spatula juggles.
A meal begins with the excellent onion-and-mushroom soup, which warms your winter belly with a deep soy-sauce stock and adds a sprinkle of fried onions. Next you might be asked to catch a morsel of the shrimp appetizer in your mouth after it sails through the air. Then come the addictive stir-fried ”Goten noodles,” and the vegetables.
When your protein is ready (if it’s beef, get it rare), the chef slices it up and slides a pile of it onto your plate from the sizzling grill. Don’t forget to dip it in the irresistible ginger sauce, which is rich but not creamy, the perfect consistency for coating meat. Ribeye steak is my favorite, but skip the frozen lobster tails.
Osaka, in downtown Northampton, isn’t just a longtime standby — it’s a longtime standout, first for its admirably late hours. On many nights, this is the only place in town where you can get a full-service sit-down dinner after 9:30 p.m. They stay open until at least 10:30 p.m. every night, and they honor their hours.
The hibachi service at Osaka, like Goten’s, sticks pretty closely to the Benihana template. Again, go for the steak and not the frozen lobster tails. One area of divergence: here, instead of noodles, you get fried rice, and it’s delicious.
Osaka’s sushi bar is also the best in town. I like their silky, spicy yellowtail with jalapeño and various other new-style sashimi. Among nigiri (sushi with vinegared rice), Osaka’s fatty, generously cut pieces of salmon and bright red, bouncy tuna stand out. Dinner combos deliver on their promise, although they’re not cheap.
For more traditional Japanese food, there’s first-rate cooking going on at Easthampton at Kisara, where a rich bath of Japanese curry and its classic carrots, potatoes and onions, plus the less standard zucchini and broccoli, turn well-pounded, breaded, and golden-fried chicken katsu into an umami bomb. It’s served over a bed of perfectly cooked rice, firm but differentiated. Kisara’s hot and spicy ramen has plenty of pork belly and doesn’t hold back on heat. For a more authentic version, ask for your noodles undercooked (extra firm).
Like most other Japanese restaurants, Kisara doesn’t do Rocky-style eatertainment, but there are other places in the area that do: Sumo Japanese Steakhouse in the Holyoke Mall, and Kobe Hibachi Sushi and Bar in Greenfield.
Rocky Aoki’seatertainment concept has spread across many restaurant genres and ethnicities, from the tableside guacamole at Rosa Mexicano in New York to Steven Schlusser’s Rainforest Café and T-REX, and — one of my favorites — Walt Disney World’s 1950s Prime Time Café, in Hollywood Studios, where a waitstaff of gruff moms will fork-feed you the rest of your green beans if you don’t finish them.
In 1995, Rocky Aoki was inducted into the US National Wrestling hall of fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Rocky died in 2008, after a gruesome family battle in which he ended up disinheriting four of his six children, but his legacy lives on with every flaming onion volcano that’s ever lit.
Robin Goldstein is the author of “The Menu: Restaurant Guide to Northampton, Amherst, and the Five-College Area.” He serves remotely on the agricultural economics faculty of the University of California, Davis. He can be reached at rgoldstein@ucdavis.edu.