What is Kasai Japanese Steakhouse?
The three gas torches still burn at 14344 N Scottsdale Road, on the east side of Scottsdale Road near Acoma Drive, between Thunderbird and Greenway in the Airpark restaurant strip. For eighteen years they marked Sapporo, the 11,000-square-foot Japanese room that opened in 2001. Since November 2018 they have marked Kasai Japanese Steakhouse, the same building under the name Sapporo’s founders gave it when they bought it back. Kasai means fire in Japanese, which is the reason the torches stayed.
The founders were Mike Russello and Patrick King. They sold Sapporo at the end of the 2000s (Arizona Foodie says 2009, AZ Big Media says 2010), opened Humble Pie, The Living Room and The Creek Patio Grill, and then returned to the old building. The relaunch was a full overhaul: new floors, a new sushi bar, elevated and rebuilt teppanyaki tables, an expanded bar patio, and a grand opening with fire dancers on Friday, November 16, 2018. King died of melanoma in 2020; a Toki whiskey and lychee cocktail called the P. King is still on the list in his honor.
What Kasai sells is the dinner show. During the pandemic closure from March 17 to July 1, 2020, Russello pulled the regular dining tables and installed four more hoodless grills, for 14 teppanyaki tables seating 146, and turned the whole room to face them. Ten chefs work the grills in Scottsdale. The seven-course dinner (shrimp starter, mushroom soup, house salad, fried rice, vegetables, your protein and a Dole Whip pineapple soft serve) starts at $39. Around it is a sushi bar, an Asian-fusion menu of Mongolian lamb chops and coconut curries, and a bar with a daily Fire Hour.
In 2026, after a quarter century under the Russello family, the restaurant was sold to EDGI, a Scottsdale company led by Robert Stidham, who told the Phoenix Business Journal he intends to franchise it. The Peoria spinoff had already closed that April. Our verdict: Kasai is the Valley’s best-run version of a formula it did not invent, a loud, well-staffed hibachi birthday room that north Scottsdale has kept full for 25 years under two names.
How to eat at Kasai
Book the right room. Kasai takes reservations on Tock through its website and by phone at (480) 607-1114, and the listing splits into two experiences: the teppanyaki dinner show and regular dining without the show, each for parties of up to 13. If you want the grill, book it; walk-in teppanyaki seats on a weekend are a long wait. Hours are Tuesday through Thursday 4 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 3 to 10 p.m., Sunday 3 to 9 p.m., closed Monday. The show takes about two hours.
Order the dinner, then upgrade one plate. The seven-course teppanyaki runs through more than 50 proteins and combinations. The 2020 price list, the last one published in the press, had chicken at $20, shrimp at $28, salmon at $30, filet mignon at $36, scallops at $34, sea bass at $42, lobster at $46 and a Wagyu filet at $70; the menu now says dinners start at $39. Filet and shrimp is the classic combination, and the lead chef, Hieu, who has worked the grill since Sapporo opened in 2001, is the chef to request for steak. From the kitchen, the Mongolian glazed lamb chops over coconut curry beurre blanc ($24 in 2020) are the dish Russello named as his own favorite and the one Phoenix Magazine singled out in its 2025 Japanese guide, along with the panko-crusted sea bass.
Sushi is the quieter option. The rolls are American-style and generous. The Tropical Island roll ($14 in 2019: bluefin, crab mix, avocado, mango, no rice) won Best Dish at Taste of Scottsdale in March 2019, and the Friends with Benefits roll ($14) was the 2020 feature. If you just want fish and a drink, sit at the bar on a weeknight, where the same kitchen moves far faster than the grills.
Time it to Fire Hour. Specials on shareables and drinks run Tuesday through Thursday 4 to 6 p.m. and Friday through Sunday 3 to 6 p.m.; Sunday extends Fire Hour all night at the bar and patio, and Wine Down Wednesday is half off most bottles and glasses. The crowd is families, office groups from the Airpark and birthday tables of every age; it is, in Russello’s words, not a place for a really quiet dinner.
Getting there. Parking is the restaurant’s own lot off Scottsdale Road. Hush Public House is a block south in East Thunderbird Square, and Kierland Commons is five minutes north for anyone making a night of it.
The room that changed its name instead of closing
Scottsdale churns through restaurant concepts every five years, which is what makes this building unusual. It went up in 2001 as Sapporo, when the Scottsdale Road corridor north of Shea was filling in around Kierland and the Airpark offices, and its bet was that the new neighborhoods wanted a big, showy Japanese room with hibachi, sushi and a lounge. They did. By the late 2010s, though, the Valley’s Japanese dining had split between omakase counters like ShinBay and robata rooms like Roka Akor at one end and the family hibachi show at the other, and Sapporo’s Pacific Rim menu sat awkwardly in the middle.
Russello and King read that and rebuilt around the grills. The 2018 rebrand had ten teppanyaki tables and a plan to enclose the south patio for three more; the 2020 shutdown gave them the chance to go further, and they came back with 14 hoodless tables and the dining room turned to face them. “Nowadays, people want more of the Japanese steakhouse,” Russello told the Scottsdale Progress that fall. The hoodless grill was the technology that mattered: it let him put a teppanyaki table anywhere, and he talked about a downtown Phoenix location that never came.
Peoria did. Kasai’s second restaurant opened on December 28, 2023, in the former Toby Keith’s at Park West, 7,500 square feet with 12 grills, a 50-seat bar and a blown-glass chandelier of flames. It lasted just over two years. Phoenix New Times reported the Peoria closure in April 2026, noting that the company had made no announcement beyond answering fans on social media (“We are sad as well”), and that the Scottsdale original remained open. Two months later KTAR reported the sale of that original to EDGI, a Scottsdale group led by Robert Stidham, after what Scottsdale City Lifestyle called 25 years under the Russello family. Stidham’s plan, told to the Phoenix Business Journal, is to franchise Kasai to resort, casino and entertainment groups, with a first agreement possible by the end of 2026. Whether a hibachi show travels as a franchise is the open question; whether the Scottsdale room keeps its chefs under new ownership is the one that matters to diners.
What the record does not say: the exact year of the original sale (2009 or 2010), who owned the building between then and 2018, and the terms of the 2026 deal.
Honest assessment: nobody drives to Kasai for the best Japanese food in Scottsdale, and the owners have never claimed it is. They drive for a two-hour show, a competent steak, a cold drink and a table of people yelling at an onion volcano, and Kasai delivers that better than any room in the north end. It belongs in the 2020s story of this corridor as the rare independent that survived by reading its audience correctly. The torches are the proof.