What was Yamakasa?
Yamakasa was the north Scottsdale sushi bar that the city’s Japanese dining scene grew out of. It sat at 9301 E Shea Blvd, near 92nd Street, in what one critic called the bowels of a Safeway plaza on the Shea Corridor, and New Times reviewed it in July 1990 as the Valley’s newest Japanese restaurant: a reincarnation, under new ownership, of a place called Restaurant Fuji.
It was a hit from the first summer. The critic found the parking lot dotted with Range Rovers at 9:30 on a Wednesday night and the room full of young, affluent north Scottsdale diners who handled chopsticks with ease. Inside there were three ways to eat: at the sushi bar, in dark-blue booths, or at low Japanese tables on a raised platform where you took off your shoes. Off-white and ink-blue walls, bamboo-pattern wallpaper and two big holding tanks of future sushi on the way to the rest rooms completed the picture.
The man behind the sushi bar was Fred Yamada, who by 1994 had built what New Times called possibly the best sushi parlor in town. Working beside him for part of that time was Nobuo Fukuda, who in a 2013 interview remembered joining Yamada’s hot new spot in 1988, years before he opened Sea Saw and won a James Beard Award.
Yamakasa did not survive its star. When Yamada left to run Sushi on Shea in 1994, taking many of his regulars and almost the same menu, Yamakasa lost its edge and folded soon after; by April 1996 a new sushi bar called Sushiko was in the storefront. Our verdict: Yamakasa set the standard for Scottsdale sushi in the early 1990s, and its real legacy is the two chefs who carried what they learned there across the city.
What the menu and the room were
Start at the sushi bar. By 1993 the bar was U-shaped and dominated the center of the room. Howard Seftel wrote that the unagi was smoky and powerful, perhaps the best item on a substantial list, and praised the maguro, the golden ikura, the salmon and even tender octopus. Sushi averaged about three dollars an order, so a hungry table filled in with tempura of shrimp, onion, broccoli, peppers, green beans and squash.
Then cook at the table. The house specialties were nabemono, hot pots prepared tableside, and the reason many people came. Sukiyaki brought razor-thin New York steak, napa cabbage, tofu, shiitake and noodles in a sweet soy and sake stock, tended by the server’s chopsticks. Chicken mizutaki simmered breast meat in a sake broth for dipping in ponzu. Shabu-shabu came with both ponzu and sesame gomadare, and was $18.50 a person in 1990, with miso soup, sunomono and tempura first. The yosenabe, a hot pot for two with whole lobster, scallops, shrimp and cod, needed two days’ notice.
Keep the rest simple. Teriyaki and tempura entrees ran $7.50 to $12.95 in 1993, which is why a Zagat guide to best meal deals put Yamakasa on its 1994 list; Seftel objected that it was good but hardly cheap. Meals began with hot towels and a cloudy, well-made miso soup. Dessert was green tea ice cream, made for the restaurant by Dreyer’s, with sweet red bean topping for 50 cents more.
Expect a wait. Both reviewers found it crowded, with diners huddled at the entrance in 1993, and the one complaint in 1990 was a server who vanished for ten minutes at a stretch late in the meal. Lunch ran weekdays and dinner nightly, to 9 p.m. on Sundays by 1993.
The crowd was the neighborhood. Critics described a north Scottsdale room of couples, families and people with cellular phones, young enough, rich enough and restless enough, as the 1990 review put it, to keep a neighborhood restaurant busy. New Times’ critics used Yamakasa as the yardstick for Japanese restaurants elsewhere in the Valley, telling Tempe and Chandler readers to drive to north Scottsdale and see how it was done.
The sushi bar that seeded the Valley
In the 1980s, by one New Times critic’s later account, Japanese dining in the Valley meant little more than Ayako of Tokyo and Tokyo Express, and Japanese cooks moved between a few kitchens. Fukuda’s own path shows the circuit: a teppanyaki job at Benihana on Scottsdale Road, four years at Ayako, then Yamakasa, where Yamada sent him back to Ayako for training. He worked ski patrol in the White Mountains and spent summers at Yamakasa when the snow melted, and it was there he met his future wife, Sarah, who worked as a hostess. They married in 1996.
Yamakasa’s decline was a story about one chef. In April 1994 New Times reported that Fred Yamada had moved from Yamakasa to oversee Sushi on Shea at 7000 E Shea, where he seemed to have lured many followers and brought over nearly the same menu, and the critic wondered whether north Scottsdale had enough sushi fans for both. It did not. Writing in December 1996, Seftel said Yamakasa had lost its edge after one of its operators left for Sushi on Shea a mile or so away, and that the rivalry did not last long. The record does not give a closing date. In April 1996 the same critic reviewed Sushiko in the shopping-center storefront that used to house Yamakasa; the Sushi Ko that the Hayashi family runs at 9301 E Shea today dates itself to 1997.
The name did not die. In May 1996 New Times reported that the folks who used to operate Yamakasa would run the sushi bar at C-Fu Gourmet’s new Chandler site at 2051 W Warner Road, and by December a revived Yamakasa there was ranked with Sushi on Shea among the Valley’s best. In 1999 a Yamakasa sushi master went to the new sushi lounge at Restaurant Hapa; Fukuda, by his own account, went to Hapa that year, then opened Sea Saw in 2002.
Honest assessment: we have two reviews, a handful of mentions and one chef’s memories, so Yamakasa’s full story is thin. What the record does show is enough. For the first half of the decade it was the place New Times measured every other Japanese restaurant against, and its two best-known cooks went on to shape Valley sushi for the next two decades.