More Morimoto

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IN THIS ISSUE: We’re going long with a profile of the Japanese T.V. chef and restaurateur Masaharu Morimoto. His glasses aren’t prescription!?

More Morimoto

By Adam Robb
Photographs by Camilo Fuentealba Brevis

The Iron Chef’s long road from Hiroshima to New York and T.V. fame, with appearances by Mariah Carey, Barry Wine, Keiko Morimoto, Donald Trump, Nobu Matsuhisa, a stick-up crew, and the atom bomb.

Masaharu Morimoto isn’t accustomed to speaking about his life.

There’s one anecdote he’s offered up over the years, like a reliable pitch, about a shoulder injury that sidelined his ambitions to be a professional ballplayer after high school.

But he has, at seventy-one, become an unscrutinized icon of American cuisine. Introduced to the U.S. as a star on the Japanese Iron Chef even as he was working and living in New York City, he became a familiar face with as much name recognition as his contemporaries like Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay, or his last employer, Nobu Matsuhisa, without anyone ever really asking him how he got there. He’s never been profiled in a major magazine; the only time the New Yorker looked his way, critic Andrea Thompson described him as “more mascot than chef.”

So when I sat down with Morimoto at his latest restaurant, MM by Morimoto, a suburban steakhouse in Montclair, New Jersey, I had the typical questions, sure: about his deprioritizing ebi sashimi for shrimp cocktail, or why prime rib sweetened with yakuniku sauce takes top billing over his signature braised black cod, and how that might translate to the restaurant he’s opening in Manhattan later this year, his first in the city after his flagship closed in the early days of Covid.