8665 NW 53rd Terrace
Miami, Florida 33166
U.S.A.
Telephone: (305) 593-0770
Fax: (305) 592-6371
Public Company
Incorporated: 1964 as Benihana of Tokyo
Employees: 1,763
Sales: $81.6 million (fiscal year ending March 31, 1996)
Stock Exchanges: NASDAQ
SICs: 5810 Retail Eating & Drinking Places
Company Perspectives:
Helping our guests feel welcome is as important as our cooking. And it is just as great a skill. Ever striving for excellence in hospitality, it is truly our restaurant family who has built Benihana's success.
Company History:
Benihana, Inc. owns and licenses restaurants in the Benihana and Benihana Grill chain of Japanese dinnerhouses. The restaurants specialize in an exhibition-style of Japanese cooking called teppanyaki. Customers sit around a communal table at which a Benihana chef slices their seafood, steak, chicken, and vegetables with lightning speed, grills their meal right in front of them, and then tosses it accurately onto their plates. The restaurants are decorated with Samurai armor and valuable art, and Shoji rice paper screens partition the dining areas. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 1996, the company had sales of over $81 million, an all-time high. By December 1996, Benihana operated a total of 49 licensed and wholly owned restaurants in 20 states as well as in Bogota, Columbia, and Aruba, Netherlands Antilles.
Early History, from Tokyo to New York
The founder of Benihana, Inc. was a 25-year-old Olympic wrestler from Japan named Hiroaki Rocky Aoki. He got his start in the restaurant business by working after school in his family's coffee shop in downtown Tokyo. His mother named the family business Benihana after a red flower that survived the bombing of Tokyo during World War II. Rocky was a scrapper, defending himself in the streets and schoolyards against bigger boys. He got hooked on wrestling, became a national university champion, and earned a place on the 1960 Olympic team. Although