Sweet and smoky chicken teriyaki is more than lunch in Seattle. It tells the story of immigration, adaptation, and one of America's best regional dishes.

There are some dishes that are so strongly tied to a single place that the folks who grew up there don't even realize they're regional until they leave. Bay Area natives assume every deli has Dutch Crunch. Pacific Northwesterners are surprised to learn that JoJos aren't sold at every gas station in America. And if you're from New York, good luck finding a proper bacon, egg, and cheese on a hard roll anywhere else.

For Seattle specifically, it’s chicken teriyaki.

There are no bad teriyaki shops in Seattle. There are good ones and there are excellent ones. The excellent ones serve juicy slices of freshly-grilled boneless chicken thighs with a deep, smoky char and crispy bits around the edges. That slight bitterness from the char is important, as it balances out the sweetness of the garlic and ginger-scented glaze that gets brushed on the chicken as it cooks and is ladled generously over it at the end.

It all comes on top of two neat domes of steamed rice, scooped with an ice cream scoop, along with an iceberg salad with sweet, creamy dressing and a token shred of carrot or red cabbage. If you’re feeling it, you can get a few gyoza on the side (always deep fried, and almost always frozen dumplings straight from the supermarket). It’s a simple, predictable, filling, and above all democratic meal, just as likely to be enjoyed by tech workers and truck drivers.

Where New York has pizza joints, Seattle has teriyaki shops.

What I especially love about Seattle’s teriyaki scene is that it’s given me an excuse to discover more of my adopted home. I’ve even made a long-running series devoted to visiting every teriyaki shop in the city (check out my teriyaki map for yourself).

Of course, I’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen working on my own version of Seattle-style teriyaki that attempts to capture the favorite elements of all of my favorite spots. And the wonderful thing about making a batch of teriyaki sauce is that it lasts virtually forever in the fridge, and has a huge number of uses beyond just an excellent marinade and sauce for chicken.

But before we get to the recipe, let’s take a quick look at how Seattle-style teriyaki developed and what makes it different from traditional Japanese teriyaki. Like so many great regional American dishes, Seattle teriyaki isn’t “authentic” to any specific cuisine. It exists because someone brought a culinary tradition with them, looked around at a new place, new ingredients, and new customers, and adapted.

Headed to Toshi Station

Seattle’s teriyaki story starts with Toshihiro "Toshi" Kasahara (seen above), who grew up in Ashikaga, Japan, before moving to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1960s. After studying business and spending time around friends in the restaurant industry, he decided to open a small restaurant of his own. In 1976 he opened Toshi's Teriyaki in Seattle's Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, just below the Space Needle.

Teriyaki already existed in Japan, of course, but it referred more to a cooking technique than to a specific dish. Traditionally, fish—or sometimes chicken or other meats—would be grilled while being repeatedly brushed with a glaze of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar until it developed the shiny finish that gives teriyaki its name (teri means shiny and yaki means grilled). Both the flavor profile and the portion sizes for teriyaki are typically light. Toshi realized that his customers were looking for something different with larger portions and meatier meals.

His original restaurant sold bone-in grilled chicken halved brushed with teriyaki glazed and served with rice and cabbage. By the time he opened his second location, the modern formula—boneless chicken thighs that are sliced before serving—became the standard.

Open Sauce

Uninterested in running a massive restaurant empire, Toshi followed a unique business plan that involved opening a single restaurant, establishing a customer base, then selling the restaurant and moving on to the next. In all, he opened over 30 restaurants in the area—a hefty chunk of the total market.

What fascinates me is that, despite all the restaurants that bore his name, Toshi wasn't building a chain in the McDonald's sense. He was building future entrepreneurs. Many of the people who he trained and who later bought his restaurants then went on to open their own shops, and then others copied them. Seattle teriyaki spread less like a franchise and more like open-source software—a simple, successful blueprint that hundreds of immigrant families adapted into their own businesses.

Later, the restaurant concept began being copied by other immigrants, and not just Japanese. Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and many other immigrant families embraced the format because it was an approachable business model: a focused menu, inexpensive equipment, and food that appealed to just about everybody. (A bonus for diners is that teriyaki shop menus often feature a few specialties unique to the family that owns the shop.)

In this way, Seattle teriyaki shops really tell part of the story of Seattle’s immigration history. Toshi created the blueprint that came from Japan, but the dish itself has now been shaped by hundreds of independent restaurant owners in the ensuing 40 years. Every shop tweaks the sauce a little. Some lean sweeter. Some heavier on garlic. Some add pineapple juice or sesame oil. Some serve spicy teriyaki that's really just sambal stirred into the glaze. Some serve the sauce on grilled short ribs, while others serve burgers brushed with teriyaki sauce.

It’s a beautiful way to see this kind of culinary evolution in real time. Not by preserving one "correct" version forever, but by hundreds of cooks making small changes over decades until a dish becomes inseparable from the place it calls home.

Today, Toshi still runs his own small teriyaki shop in a strip mall in Mill Creek. I had the opportunity to see him in action and sit down to chat with him last year (you can catch that interview here). He maintains a remarkably humble and down-to-earth attitude for someone who played such a huge role in shaping a regional cuisine. The chicken at his shop is an interesting outlier in the current Seattle teriyaki scene. Most modern teriyaki sauce is thickened with starch until it has a maple syrup-like glaze consistency. It’s flavored strongly with garlic and ginger. It may even have some Hawaiian influence with the inclusion of pineapple juice or sesame oil.

Toshi’s sauce seems thicker than a traditional Japanese sauce, but much cleaner in flavor and not nearly as thick as modern sauces tend to be. The chicken was exactly what I wanted it to be: smoky from the grill, glossy with sauce, sweet without being cloying, and balanced by those deeply charred edges that keep everything from tipping over into candy territory.

If you want to create something more akin to Toshi’s original, you can use the simple teriyaki sauce recipe from my book The Wok or from the excellent website, Just One Cookbook.

For modern Seattle-style teriyaki, however, you need to do just a bit more work.

Glaze Anatomy

The sauce begins the same way a traditional teriyaki sauce begins: combining soy sauce, sake, mirin, and sugar in a saucepan and reducing it to thicken.

As the mixture reduces, I like to add a few slices of ginger and some crushed whole garlic cloves in order to build a base flavor. In addition to that, I also add a good amount of finely minced ginger and garlic to simmer and soften as the sauce reduces. The idea is that when the sauce is ready, I can take the sliced ginger and whole cloves of garlic out, leaving in the minced bits for that extra punch of flavor.

Where Japanese-style sauce would be thickened only by reducing and concentrating its sugar content, Seattle-style sauce is commonly thickened with a cornstarch slurry in order to help it cling to the chicken better. Finally, I like to punch mine up with the smallest splash of rice vinegar.

With that basic sauce, you can, of course, feel free to adjust the flavors as you see fit. For spicy-style teriyaki, just stir in a few spoonfuls of chili-garlic sauce. If you like pineapple juice, add some pineapple juice into the original reduction. A small splash of roasted sesame oil will get emulsified into the sauce as soon as you add the starch slurry to give it a subtle sesame flavor.

A Brush with Greatness

With the sauce made, the chicken is simple. As forgiving as chicken thighs are, it can still be a bit tricky to nail the exact right level of char while maintaining an interior juiciness. Using the sauce as a marinade for at least an hour and up to overnight helps with that. The salt in the marinade will help break down the chicken’s muscle proteins so that it is able to retain more moisture as it cooks, giving you a generous window of time to build up a nice char without having to worry about the chicken overcooking. (Just make sure not to over-marinate or your chicken may end up with the texture of ham.)

I like to flip my chicken relatively frequently and move it around the grill as it cooks in order to maximize charring on both sides. As the chicken approaches doneness, I brush on the extra sauce in a few layers, closing the lid and letting each layer cook down onto the chicken before brushing on the next. This step ensures that the sauce doesn’t burn while allowing you to build up layers of flavorful glaze on the meat.

As for the salad, it's almost comically simple: iceberg lettuce, a little shredded carrot, maybe two strands of red cabbage if you’re feeling generous, and a sweet mayonnaise dressing that’s nothing more than Japanese mayo, sugar, rice wine vinegar, and plenty of black pepper.

Between the soy sauce, sugar, and alcohol in the teriyaki sauce, it's remarkably stable in the refrigerator, so it's worth making a big batch. Once you've got a jar sitting in the fridge, you're halfway to dinner. Brush it on salmon, pork chops, steak, tofu, vegetables, rice balls, burgers, corn on the cob, spam, or whatever else happens to hit the grill for the last few minutes of cooking and you’ve got dinner.

It’s no secret that I think Seattle teriyaki deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Philly cheesesteaks, Buffalo wings, and Cincinnati chili. Dishes famous not because they are old and timeless, but because they are dishes that have become part of the regional culinary vernacular. They’re regional dishes that America has invented within my lifetime, and that’s really exciting.

I strongly encourage you to all come visit Seattle and hit up some of our local teriyaki joints! But if you don't, this is about as close as you're likely to get. And if you're a member of the Cookbook Club, you'll soon receive even more applications for where you can use this delicious glaze.

A Recipe in Three Parts

This recipe is broken into three parts walking you through making the sauce, grilling the chicken, and assembling the side salad. See links to each part below and enjoy:

🔗 Seattle-Style Teriyaki Sauce, used for the marinade and glaze.

🔗 Seattle-Style Chicken Teriyaki, grilling and assembling the dish.

🔗 Teriyaki Shop Salad with Sweet Mayo Dressing, an essential side for Seattle-style teriyaki.