The path to the American dream is often through a restaurant kitchen. That is certainly true at the downtown Milwaukee outpost of the Benihana Japanese steakhouse chain.
Rocky Aoki came to this country from Japan at 19 to go to school, and he supported himself selling ice cream out of a truck in Harlem while studying restaurant management at New York City Community College.
Within four years of arriving in the U.S., Aoki used $10,000 he had saved to open the first Benihana restaurant — the name means red flower in Japanese — in mid-town Manhattan in 1964. It had only four tables, and when business soared after a positive review in the old New York Herald-Tribune, the young restaurateur opened a second location in the Big Apple.
