Globally speaking, Bourbon whiskey and fried chicken are the only refreshments specifically identified with Kentucky. Local “hardboots,” as the state’s horse folk are called, might dispute that, pointing to such delights as burgoo, a stew of miscellaneous meat and vegetables, and to Kentucky hot brown, a stack of bread, country ham, turkey, cheese, and tomato browned under an overhead grill. Still, it’s safe to say that the urbane Japanese executives who arrived at the new Toyota assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1988 must have felt pangs of gustatory homesickness.
Looking around the unfamiliar surroundings of even Lexington’s finest restaurants, newcomers like plant president Fujio Cho and his old friend and colleague Kozo Fukuda, raised on a famously marine cuisine known for its elegant presentation, probably felt something like 19th-century Russian ballerinas at their first square dance. Learning that their factories were in a then “dry” county can only have deepened the shock.
Now president and top executive of all of Toyota, Cho was at the time already well known for not only talking, but listening, to his workers on the plant floor. What he heard evidently inspired him to direct parts supplier Fukuda to organize the assembly of another component he deemed vital to the production of the Toyota Camry in America: a first-class Japanese restaurant, preferably in neighboring Lexington, where the food could be accompanied by sake and Suntory.
A boyhood admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo, Cho chose Wright’s own designated heir, Taliesin Architects, to design Tachibana, the grandest of Lexington’s still-spawning Japanese restaurants. With it he would, like Commodore Perry working in the opposite direction a century and a half earlier, bring the astonishing novelties of another world to the attention of an insular population.
Emboldened local farmers, whose diets had for the past 200 years been nearly as immutable as those of their horses, began to drift over to the sushi bar to see what the hell was going on. There, in addition to the expected Toyota people, they found the nomadic and cosmopolitan apparatus of thoroughbred horse racing: the Irish and French and English bloodstock agents, the owners, the trainers, and the jockeys (glad for something tasty that didn’t add weight)—all of them eating little fish bonbons made by hand right in front of them.
“First it was seventy percent Japanese, thirty percent American,” says Tachibana’s manager, Takashi Iwata. “But now our customers are seventy percent American, thirty percent Japanese.” Though the waitresses don’t wear kimonos, Tachibana serves only traditional Japanese cuisine. “I always believed Americans would like traditional Japanese food,” says Iwata, “not what they used to think was Japanese food before real Japanese food came here.”
He is referring, no doubt, to the samurai-barbecue pastiche concocted in the 1960s by the great Rocky Aoki. A Japanese with a Buffalo Bill instinct for showmanship, Aoki was a man whose production values—high red toques, a décor more Japanesque than Japanese, dazzling knife work, and an open grill that enabled potentially suspicious diners to see exactly what was happening to their genuine American corn-fed beef—proved box office magic. Benihana franchises succeeded even in heartland population centers where the only prior experience of Asian culture had involved the keeping of goldfish. Like San Francisco’s 19th-century chop suey parlors before them, Benihanas and the copycat steak houses that succeeded them introduced Americans to what many of us initially took to be the experience of a cuisine from a faraway land.
“When I ran a Japanese steak house outside of Indianapolis in the ’70s,” says Marie Wood, “we never even tried sushi. It would have scared them away.”
The Okinawa-born widow of a Korean War veteran, Wood now runs Tachibana’s largest competitor, Nagasaki Inn. Though she opened the restaurant in 1983, it wasn’t until Japanese customers from the forthcoming Toyota plant began placing their shoes outside her door that she decided to hire a real sushi chef.
The horse people already frequenting the restaurants were joined by the homebred apprentices who would ultimately replace most of the Japanese workforce at Toyota. And these locals brought their friends and families. Academic palates from the University of Kentucky and Transylvania University were willing to try the new food.
Given that the sushi chefs here are all native Japanese and rarely fluent in English (unlike the kitchen chefs, who, even at Tachibana, now come from other Asian countries, usually Vietnam), only Japanese customers can really provide the exchange of banter invited by the sushi bar layout. Holding court at his eponymous Sugano, a sophisticated Japanese restaurant in a very unsophisticated part of town, the ex–chief sushi chef of Tachibana engages the chic young Japanese couple sitting before him. They’ve apparently asked the old master why the hair spiking up from his samurai-style headband has been dyed blonde. “To be crazy!” he replies in English to everyone watching, laughing merrily.
At Tomo, a sleeker enterprise in the Chevy Chase shopping area, Rogers Beasley, director of racing for Lexington’s beautiful old Keeneland racetrack, explains to a large table of Lexingtonians how close the cultures of Japan and Kentucky had already come thanks to thoroughbred racing. “The most amazing guy was old Zenya Yoshida,” he says, “who showed up here for the Keeneland Sale paying top dollar in the ’60s—he was about as shrewd a horse trader as they come. The Yoshida family has three thoroughbred operations up in Hokkaido, where it’s cold in the winter, like here. You get great sushi up in Hokkaido, of course. But I honestly think the toro here compares. And have you ever tried the giant clam or the flying-fish eggs?”
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