Roy Yamaguchi, chef/owner
Roy's
6600 Kalanaianaole Hwy.
Honolulu, Hawaii
(808) 396-7697
Chefs have become our latest genre of superstars. That much is a fact. But I've often wondered why chefs should be singled out for superstardom more than, say, auto mechanics or CPAs. Why shouldn't there be a television show called Iron Dentist, in which three oral surgeons compete to perform the fastest root canals and most elaborate bridgework? I guess chefs get the nod because cooking is sexy, while rebuilding transmissions, analyzing balance sheets, and pulling teeth aren't.

Among the hottest of today's superstar chefs is Roy Yamaguchi. Aside from starring in his own PBS television series, Hawaii Cooks, where for seven seasons he's shared Hawaiian culture and cuisine with the rest of us, Yamaguchi also gets to rub shoulders with top Hollywood movie- and music-biz celebrities - he's cooked alongside Kevin Costner in Aspen (where the leading man played sous-chef and nearly flambéed his own goatee off). Yamaguchi was also drafted to cook, along with Roy's New York chef James Dangler, for one of this year's Grammy Awards after-parties.

The son of a career military man from Maui and his Okinawan wife, Yamaguchi was brought up in a tricultural milieu - part Japanese, part Hawaiian, and part mainstream American. He was born in Tokyo and lived there until the age of 17. His grandfather owned a tavern in Wailuku, Maui, and the young Yamaguchi spent time discovering the bounty of Hawaiian seafood on visits there with his parents. When he enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, he got his first exposure to French classical training.

After graduation, he opted for a laid-back Southern California lifestyle - if professional cooking can ever be considered laid-back. He took an apprenticeship at L'Ermitage in Los Angeles with chef Jean Bertranou, whom Yamaguchi thinks of to this day as his mentor. "I learned more there in two and a half years than I could have anywhere else."

Roy's own eclectic style of cooking finally came into bloom in 1984 when he opened his first restaurant, 385 North, on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood. Combining Californian, French, Japanese, and Hawaiian flavors seemed perfectly natural to Yamaguchi, who considered his cooking at the time "the next evolutionary step."