The lost recipe from a dying man that made his daughter a multimillionaire

How a university drop-out came to be in charge of a $82 million company

Rachel Hosie
Thursday 27 April 2017 14:54 BST
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(Flickr)

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It’s a story worthy of a Hollywood film. Struggling woman finds secret recipe from her dead father which then results in her opening a restaurant chain and becoming a multimillionaire.

And it’s all true.

Hiroe Tanaka was just 21 when her father died. And along with her father, Tanaka thought his recipe for kushikatsu was lost forever as well.

A popular street food in the Osaka in Western Japan, kushikatsu consists of battered meat and vegetables on a skewer, deep-fried and then dipped in sauce.

It was one of Tanaka’s favourite foods growing up and her father had spent hours and hours perfecting his recipe when he wasn’t working as a real estate agent.

After her father died, Tanaka started a degree in literature but then dropped out and started administrative work.

She’d spend her free time trying - and failing - to recreate her father’s perfect kushikatsu, so in the late 1990s decided she wanted to have a career in food and took a job with Keiju Nuki, a bar manager in Osaka.

The years went by but Tanaka just couldn’t get her kushikatsu right: “It wasn’t as simple as I thought,” she says. “I began to think, maybe I can’t do it after all.”

The global financial crisis of 2008 only made her problems worse because Nuki was forced to close his restaurants and Tanaka had no choice but to pack up her things.

But that’s when it happened.

As she sorted through her possessions, Tanaka stumbled upon a handwritten note from her father in a box of his mementoes - it was his kushikatsu recipe, covered in corrections as he’d perfected it.

And that one memo transformed Tanaka from part-time employee to vice-president of a company in her own name - she now heads up the $82 million Kushikatsu Tanaka Co.

Nuki and Tanaka tried the recipe and it worked. They took a leap of faith and decided to open a restaurant serving the kushikatsu in a quiet residential area outside central Tokyo.

It was a resounding success. Before long, there were queues down the street to get into the restaurant even at 1am and there were so many bicycles parked outside that neighbours complained.

Tanaka and Nuki, now the company president, swiftly opened a second and third restaurant and they now have 146 branches across Japan, one in Hawaii and plans to open 40 more this year.

“I pay tribute to my father every day,” Tanaka, 46, says in an interview. “It all happened because of the recipe.”

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