What was Sapporo?
For roughly eighteen years, the landmark at Scottsdale Road and Acoma Drive was not a sign but a set of flames: three gas torches burning at the door of Sapporo, an 11,000-square-foot Japanese restaurant that treated dinner as a production.
The concept was a three-way split that north Scottsdale took to immediately. In back, teppanyaki tables ran the hibachi show — knives flashing, onion volcanoes, shrimp tails flipped toward a chef’s hat — for birthday parties and visiting relatives. Up front, a long sushi bar rolled for a crowd that had learned to love raw fish at Sushi on Shea and the original Kona Grill and now wanted somewhere bigger and louder. Between them sat a bar and lounge that on weekend nights became one of the corridor’s dependable scenes, which is why review sites filed the place under bars as readily as restaurants. OpenTable’s label for the menu was “Pacific Rim,” and that was honest: the kitchen roamed from Tokyo toward Honolulu and well beyond without apology.
The owners were Mike Russello and Patrick King, and the building was the point — airy, high-ceilinged, torch-lit, big enough that a Friday table for twelve was never a problem. It was never a critic’s darling and never tried to be. It was where north Scottsdale went when the occasion called for fire.
In November 2018, Russello and King retired the name. The room got new floors, a new sushi bar, rebuilt teppanyaki tables, and a new identity: Kasai, Japanese for “fire.” The torches stayed lit. Sapporo — the name, and a certain 2000s idea of a night out — was gone.
The hibachi, the bar, and the birthday table
The teppanyaki tables were the engine. You booked them for a reason: a twelfth birthday, a brother-in-law from Minneapolis, the office party nobody wanted to plan. Eight strangers around a hot steel griddle, a chef with a spatula and a repertoire of jokes older than the restaurant, and a procession of soup, salad, shrimp, fried rice, vegetables, and the protein of your choosing — filet, chicken, scallops, lobster for the show-off. The food was fine. The theater was the order.
The sushi bar was for the regulars. On weeknights the counter drew a different crowd: Airpark office workers, couples down from Kierland, the north Scottsdale diner who wanted a spicy tuna roll and a cold beer without a forty-minute knife show. The rolls were American-style — cream cheese, tempura crunch, eel sauce, spicy mayo — and the kitchen made no pretense of being Sea Saw or, later, ShinBay. It was volume sushi done competently, and the room was good at it.
The bar was the after-party. On weekends the lounge filled with people who had come for a drink and might or might not stay for dinner.
Logistics were easy. Parking was a private lot, the room swallowed big parties, and the location — a straight shot from Kierland Commons and the Scottsdale Promenade, a few blocks from the corner Hush Public House occupies today — made it the default for anyone north of Shea who wanted Japanese without driving to Old Town. Prices sat in the middle: a hibachi dinner was a family splurge; sushi and a beer at the bar was a Tuesday.
From Sapporo to Kasai: a room that outlived its name
Sapporo arrived around the turn of the millennium, when north Scottsdale was converting from desert to destination at speed. Kierland Commons was rising, the Westin Kierland would open in 2002, and Scottsdale Road north of Shea was filling with restaurants built for a population that had not existed a decade earlier. Sapporo’s bet — that these neighborhoods wanted a big, glamorous, slightly showy Japanese room — was the bet P.F. Chang’s and RA Sushi had made about mall Asian a few years earlier, scaled up and moved north. It paid off for the better part of two decades.
What changed was the audience. By the mid-2010s the Valley’s Japanese dining had split in two. At the top, omakase counters and robata rooms like Roka Akor made “Pacific Rim” sound like a dated phrase. At the popular end, the hibachi show had become the thing families actually drove for.
Russello and King read that correctly. The November 2018 rebrand to Kasai leaned into the griddles — the name means fire, the torches became the logo, and the remodel turned the floor so guests looked across the sushi bar and lounge toward the teppanyaki tables. When the pandemic closed the doors from March to July 2020, they used the pause to pull dining tables and add hibachi stations: fourteen tables seating 146. “Nowadays, people want more of the Japanese steakhouse,” Russello told the Scottsdale Progress that fall. That is Sapporo’s epitaph — not a failure, but a market that decided the show was the whole point.
Honest assessment: Sapporo was never the best Japanese food in Scottsdale, and nobody who ate there thought it was. It was something rarer in a city that churns through concepts every five years: a big, independent, locally owned room that held one corner for eighteen years and then changed its name instead of closing. The torches are still burning. Most of its contemporaries cannot say that.