“I’m a very powerful guy, a fighter,” he says with a smile. You are good.’ They were happy.” He was only 12 or 13 at the time, but he had already found his calling.ĭespite being teased by kids at school because he was a boy doing what they thought was a girl’s job, Tojo persevered. Everybody said, ‘It’s good.’ Family and visitors said, ‘Wow this is excellent, delicious. Cooking, cooking, cooking, every day, every day. “We have a big family, and after school, my activities were cooking dinner. “I wanted to eat this stuff at home, so they said, ‘Ok, if you want to eat meat, you cook it yourself,’” he recalls of his parents. But at school, a young Tojo saw classmates eating a wide range of meat and seafood. Born in Southern Kagoshima, Japan in 1950, he grew up in a household with a pescatarian mother and a father who only ate chicken. That is bad manners.”Ĭertainly, Tojo became famous by doing things his own way. “In this city, many restaurants have similar food. I like to make my own food,” he says emphatically. And here, right in front of him, is the proof. He might be known in food circles as the chef who invented the California Roll, but his contributions to sushi culture stretch much farther. Tojo is not the conceited type, but he is a man of truth and conviction. Though most of the world doesn’t know that. Depicted in a photograph about Tojo’s is a bowl of spicy tuna and a Rainbow Roll-two dishes that Tojo says he introduced to the world. “Tojo’s opened 1988, and the next year they’re talking about Vancouver sushi,” he says of the magazine article. He flips to a bookmarked page and sets it down. Finally, he finds what he is looking for: an issue of a Japanese magazine published in 1989.
He has been on NBC’s Today Show, he has been recognized by Distinguished Restaurants of North America, and he has been appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for Japanese Cuisine by the Japanese government-making him one of only 13 in the world.īut right now, a jovial Tojo is sorting through a large and jumbled pile of photographs in his small office that sits above his iconic restaurant. He is celebrated around the world for his quality Japanese food that puts Western twists on traditional dishes and techniques. Aside from their celebrity, this group might not have a lot in common-except that they are all immortalized in paper-sized photographs protected in plastic binder sheets, standing next to the same man: Hidekazu Tojo.Ĭhef Tojo is a legend, to say the least. It is a hodgepodge of famous people, running the gamut from politics to music to golf. In this feature and intimate video, Vancouver’s legendary Japanese chef Hidekazu Tojo shares his journey and the creation of his now-ubiquitous strategy for hiding the seaweed and making sushi more appealing to Canadian eaters. Putting rice on the outside of a sushi roll might be commonplace now, but that wasn’t always the case.
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