It’s been a banner year for Toshi Kizaki, the chef and restaurateur behind the eponymous, omakase sushi restaurant on South Pearl Street in the Platt Park neighborhood. He opened Kizaki to serve traditional “Edomae sushi” (the sushi created in Edo, the former name of Tokyo, in the early 1800s) earlier this year, claiming it is his “vision of retirement,” his crowning achievement.
And a crowning achievement is exactly what it’s been.
Kizaki, located in an unassuming box of a storefront at 1551 S. Pearl St., a block down from his iconic original eatery Sushi Den, was awarded a Michelin star this summer — making him, at age 69, the oldest sushi chef in the U.S. to earn his first Michelin recognition.
Now, Esquire magazine has awarded a new honor to Toshi-san, which is what everyone calls him, naming Kizaki one of the best new restaurants in the country for 2025 (along with another Denver hotspot, Johnny Curiel’s Michelin-recommended Alteño in Cherry Creek).
“I’ve had the honor of serving Denver diners for 40 years, but it wasn’t until I opened Kizaki that I felt fully fulfilled as a chef,” Toshi-san said in a prepared statement. “Kizaki is a revival of the centuries-old art of ‘edomae’ sushi. With every service, I’m sharing the beauty and simplicity of my home with guests. I couldn’t be more thankful to the support, and celebration, that I’ve received.”
Kizaki has been building an empire for his Japanese fare since Christmas Eve of 1984, when he and his brother Yasu opened Sushi Den on a quiet retail block in an otherwise residential neighborhood. At the time, sushi was becoming a more mainstream option in American dining culture, but it was still more of an “on the coasts” phenomenon. The John Hughes brat pack hit movie “The Breakfast Club” released the next year featured the famous scene of a snooty spoiled student, played by Molly Ringwald, opening a bento box and eating sushi to the horror of the other students stuck in detention with her.
But the Kizaki brothers saw the future, and it was bright with visions of raw fish and seaweed. They flew in fresh fish from Japan with the help of family members (who still pack and ship fish across the Pacific even today), and Sushi Den became known for having the freshest authentic sashimi and sushi.
Japanese families could tell the quality was the real deal. This writer’s mother, who came from Hokkaido, Japan, and knows fresh fish when she tastes it, was adamant that Sushi Den served the best seafood. In 1991, my father had been sick with lung cancer for about a year when he insisted we go out for dinner at Sushi Den. He passed away the next day. Kizaki still remembers my parents and their loyalty to his food.
Over the years, Kizaki added more businesses to the portfolio: Izakaya Den was added in 2007 across the street (it’s now next door to Sushi Den) serving a tavern-style mix of small plates and traditional dishes. Izakaya in Japan are places where salarymen and women congregate after hours to eat, drink and be merry. Ototo (which means “younger brother” in Japanese) was added catty-corner from Sushi Den in 2010, and has closed and re-opened a couple of times, most recently because of COVID. It is open again, evolved from a casual robata-style Japanese grill into a small-plates eatery and raw bar.
Kizaki has aimed high and missed a couple of times. At one point he put a “Deli Den” in the Ototo space, but the casual fish market and deli-style concept didn’t last long. He also tried opening a satellite Sushi Den in Cherry Creek, but he admits it was difficult to stretch his staff between Platt Park’s loyal customer base and Cherry Creek’s upscale diners. He still operates a successful spot, the Michelin-recommended Temaki Den, with partner chef Kenta Kamo, serving handrolls and aburi (flame torched) sushi in The Source food hall in the RiNo District.
It’s the chef’s choice
As Toshi-san considered his 70th birthday, he began planning Kizaki, where he could reign supreme as the master chef deciding his menu daily and serving the sushi piece by piece at a small, nine-person counter (and an adjoining small dining room for other customers who — sadly — don’t get to interact with him).
Omakase means “I leave it up to you” and the customers put their faith entirely in the sushi chef. The style is intimate … and expensive. The meals can take a couple of hours interacting with the master and his assistants as well as beverage experts, and cost more than a couple hundred dollars per person.
Omakase is an old concept in Japan but has caught on in Denver, with a handful of restaurants serving omakase-style dinners. Many Americans were introduced to the idea by the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” about Jiro Ono of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny but legendary omakase counter in a train station in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills district where customers have to make reservations months in advance. When director David Gelb made the film, Ono was already 85. Although Ono no longer runs the restaurant that bears his name, he co-owns it with his son Yoshikazu, who’s now in his mid-60s. Jiro Ono turned 100 in October.
Kizaki seems happy to have found his ”retirement” spot without plans to keep working for several more decades. But you never know. Having earned a Michelin honor and the Esquire recognition, he could receive more recognition — hello, James Beard Foundation?
Accepting the honor
Kizaki began an interview with an interpreter on hand, but then as he found I spoke enough Japanese to have a conversation, he relaxed and stopped being so formal.
Earning a Michelin star has been a long time coming. (To be fair, Michelin didn’t even pay attention to Denver restaurants until 2023, and Sushi Den has earned many local awards over the years.) “He is really honored to and grateful to receive a Michelin star,” the interpreter replied. “He feels that he’s been kind of fulfilled as a business owner, but not as a chef. So this star means a lot.”
When he’s described as a sort of Jiro of Colorado, Kizaki winces. “I think he is pretty different,” the interpreter replied
Well, he’s certainly nicer than the gruff boss of the documentary, who wouldn’t let his adult son take over the Tokyo restaurant and caused another son to leave and open his own place. “I think he has a more open mind, yes,” the interpreter said. “Yes, Jiro is strict, of course but that is Japan.”
Toshi-san began responding more to the questions on his own.
His first restaurants are more modern and Americanized, but Kizaki feels more traditional, because of the concept of omakase, and Toshi-san’s dedication to preserving traditional Japanese cuisine.
He agrees, but only to a point. “The food is 95% Japanese, 5% American,” he says.
That’s natural, because he’s in another country serving people from another culture. Every ethnic restaurant in America has to adapt to American tastes. Chefs at every Thai, Korean or other Asian restaurant, make everything sweeter for American palates, for instance.
Yet, every chef at the best Japanese restaurants (and there are plenty of second- and third-rate Japanese joints around Denver) gives a respectful nod when asked about Toshi Kizaki, and they all say he is the OG sushi master.
That’s the phrase that’s used to describe him by his peers, and the many chefs Kizaki has worked with and mentored at his restaurants over the decades. “OG sushi chef.” And, they all think of him as being very traditional.
In typical Japanese show of humility, though, Kizaki looks down when he hears this. “So I have that kind of mind. But see, this is business, yes, so I don’t just do what I want.” He knows, for instance, that he must serve California rolls at Sushi Den, but not at Kizaki.
As one example of his understanding of his Denver customers, he notes that he’s from the city of Kumamoto in Kyushu, the southern main island of Japan.
One of the famous local delicacies in Kumamoto is basashi, which is horsemeat. It’s eaten raw as sushi, or sliced and placed on ramen, or cooked like any other red meat as a local specialty (no, it doesn’t taste like chicken — it tastes like lean beef). The story goes that Kumamoto’s castle was under siege, and the samurai ended up having to eat the meat of horses to avoid starvation.
Kizaki admits on one trip to Japan he brought back some basashi, but he didn’t dare serve it to Denver diners. He ate it himself.
“It was a long time ago, when I brought it. It was a secret, really not for the customer,” he says. So he understands his audience.
Learning the trade in Tokyo, the business in LA
From his youth in Kyushu, he went to work in restaurants in Tokyo, then came to the U.S. in 1979 in pursuit of the American dream. “You know, a lot of people talk about that. People make money here, then send their money back home. That’s true. So you can make more money here,” he says.
He worked in Los Angeles and got his green card, and in the early 1980s, he came to Denver when he saw an ad for a job in a Japanese restaurant.
“I found a job here at Kobe An, the one in Lakewood, the original one.” He went from Kobe An to Zen, a French-Japanese restaurant on East Hampden, then downtown to a restaurant called Sushi Koi. He was also involved for a brief time with a sushi bar installed in Pelican Pete’s seafood restaurant in Boulder, just north of the University of Colorado campus. It was the first real presence of sushi in the area, and predated Sushi Den. Its chefs went on in Boulder to run Sushi Tora and other restaurants.
But Sushi Den cemented Kizaki’s place as a Denver dining demi-god. He says he didn’t want to work for someone else, and with his experience with the freshest seafood and sushi restaurants in Japan, “I wanted to, you know, make Denver customers happy, simply.”
His experience in Los Angeles gave him knowledge of suppliers for the best fish throughout the year, so it didn’t always have to come from Japan. It could be from Mexico, or from the Atlantic.
He chose Platt Park because he didn’t have the money to open a restaurant downtown or in Cherry Creek. He found the South Pearl location was affordable. It turns out to have been a prescient decision, since it allowed him to expand his restaurant and then buy up other spaces for his family of eateries. He also serves as landlord for other businesses in the neighborhood, including the popular Tokyo Premium Bakery across Pearl from Kizaki.
Now, with his empire built, and his much-deserved accolades coming his way, Kizaki is humble about his accomplishments and grateful for the embrace by middle America for Japanese cuisine. If he’s had any part in raising the bar for the quality of “Nihonshoku,” or Japanese food in Denver, he’s willing to be nice to anyone who is serving lesser quality dishes or food that really isn’t very Japanese, sold by cultural appropriators to make a buck off the cuisine he’s spent a lifetime perfecting.
“Japanese food is getting more popular,” he acknowledges. “And yes, sometimes it’s different, you know.”
Instead of throwing stones at pretenders and appropriators, he’s pleased that his own restaurants have done well, and that staying true to his vision has paid off. “I’m glad that Japanese people think it’s good, and I think now American people think it’s good too.”
Kizaki is at 1551 S. Pearl St., and open 5 to 10:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; kizakiden.com