As he wandered around the bombed-out streets of Tokyo, Yunosuke Aoki stumbled across a lone red safflower blooming from beneath the rubble. It was March 1945, just months before the end of World War II. America had firebombed the city to a near-crisp in a campaign carried out over the course of a single night. For Yunosuke, that safflower, or benihana, stood as an auspicious symbol in the wreckage, a small sign of hope sprouting in a debris field.

He and his wife, Katsu, had opened a coffee shop called Ellington, named after Duke, a decade earlier in that same stretch of Tokyo known as Nihonbashi. Inside, they played American jazz for patrons. This was a time of widespread affection for American culture. Then came the war. The constant threat of American aggression squeezed the family out of the city. In early 1944, Yunosuke, Katsu, and their four small sons departed Tokyo to live with Katsu’s parents in Gunma Prefecture until they could safely return to Tokyo.

When they came back to the city the next year, the family discovered that American bombs had destroyed their home. Yunosuke wanted to start a new business, but he knew he couldn’t possibly call it Ellington. The wounds from the war were still raw, and animus for anything American was at its apex. That flower was the next thing to come to mind.

Benihana wasn’t the only shop to serve coffee, tea, and sweets in that post-war landscape. But what set it apart was that Yunosuke allegedly biked 20 miles just to barter on the black market for real sugar. The ingredient had, through scarcity, become a commodity. Yunosuke and Katsu baked cakes with the sugar and spooned it into cups of coffee. Surrounding cafes stocked their kitchens with more readily available and low-cost substitutes, so when Yunosuke and Katsu placed a bowl of the real stuff on each table, customers just gazed at it, slack-jawed in awe.

The couple’s firstborn, Hiroaki, was similarly spellbound by his parents’ ability to make money in a post-war period when capital seemed rarer than the sugar their customers were enjoying. Soon enough, at the recommendation of a chef they’d met, the couple turned Benihana into a restaurant, a decision that catapulted them to the city’s upper class. The Aoki family became rich, and young Hiroaki got a taste of what was possible for his own future.

Roughly 15 years after his parents opened their coffee shop in the shadow of World War II, Hiroaki traveled to New York on a wrestling scholarship. Upon arrival in the United States, he’d change his name to “Rocky” at the insistence of an Amateur Athletic Union member who couldn’t pronounce his given name. He’d eventually leave his amateur wrestling career behind to pursue an associate’s degree in management. He’d pool his family’s resources from Japan and the $10,000 he’d saved up from odd jobs, including a fruitful stint doling out soft-serve from a Mister Softee truck in Harlem, to create a four-table Japanese steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan. He’d call this restaurant Benihana.

Rocky would open many more locations of Benihana beyond that initial one in Midtown, becoming a multimillionaire by 1979 and eventually engineering a global empire of 78 locations, its tentacles spread across the states, Aruba, Panama, El Salvador, and Brazil. It’s a restaurant where onions spout flames with the intensity of five-alarm housefires; where oil-glazed prawns somersault midair; where sorcerous cooks sport bouffant red toques that are decidedly more French than Japanese.

The restaurant’s exaggerated theater is commensurate with the life of the man responsible for bringing it to this country in the first place. Rocky Aoki led a life of unrepentant excess, one that probably merits a meaty biopic. He embodied the dick-swinging, occasionally-toxic braggadocio associated with a number of today’s most visible male celebrity chefs.

Rocky Aoki’s life has a touch of the ridiculous. He was a man who survived a near-fatal power-boating accident in September 1979 that ruptured his aorta and lacerated his liver; who boasted about fathering three different kids from three different women “at exactly the same time”; who launched both a softcore porn magazine called Genesis and a four-story nightclub called Club Genesis; who began a failed line of frozen entrees with the tagline “Benihana. We either make it great, or we don’t make it at all”; who piloted a helium hot air balloon across the Pacific Ocean; who stepped down from his own company once he found himself under investigation, and eventually prosecuted, for insider trading in 1999; who sued four of his seven children in 2006 for breach of fiduciary duty.

In his final years, the rich spectacle of Aoki’s life all but eclipsed his achievements. He was the subject of “Rocky’s Family Horror Show,” a lengthy New York magazine story by Logan Hill in November 2006. Published just after he filed the lawsuit against the children, the piece created a portrait of irresolvable familial chaos with Rocky at the eye of the hurricane.

That lawsuit was unresolved even at the time of his death in July 2008 from complications from pneumonia; he was 69. The suit eventually fell to his last wife, Keiko Ono Aoki, who by that point was entangled in a separate legal dispute with two of Rocky’s children to determine the rightful heir to the multimillion-dollar Benihana Protective Trust. In 2016, a judge ruled in favor of two of Rocky’s children, DJ Steve and model-actress Devon. Kevin, who was one of the children named in Rocky’s 2006 lawsuit, speaks of his father in positive terms today and avoids going into detail about the lawsuit. “Things went a little bit haywire,” he tells me of that period in the family’s history, implying that the conflict’s scars have faded.

His life’s plot points feel lifted from a work of bargain-bin fiction, and such details, along with Rocky’s open-armed embrace of this rowdy image (“I was like Trump,” he once gloated of his wealth once he became a millionaire), have made it easy to treat Rocky as an object of fascination. Perhaps unintentionally, the preoccupation with these dramatics has resulted in a general hesitation to grapple with the precise nature of his culinary legacy, and, in particular, the racial fault lines he toed as a Japanese restaurateur diluting Japanese flavors to satisfy American tastes.

“He introduced teppanyaki-style dining to American audiences,” Hiroko Shimbo, a Japanese-born cookbook author who now lives in New York, writes me. The iron grill method of teppanyaki was popularized by chef Shigeji Fujioka of Misono, a restaurant in the city of Kobe, where, in 1945, Fujioka began cooking steaks on flat, iron plates for American troops longing for a taste of home. These are the knotty foodways at Benihana’s core: Teppanyaki is American by way of Japan by way of America.

Even at the height of Rocky’s influence, when America’s taste for Japanese food was far more rudimentary than it is today, he wasn’t immune to the charge that his restaurants were aggressively inauthentic simulacrums of Japanese dining. In 1979, the Texas Monthly restaurant critic lampooned the restaurant’s theatrics as “the Japanese equivalent of the minstrel show.” Culinary yellowface, in other words. Though Benihana might be Japanese cuisine in scare quotes, Rocky didn’t apologize. Sometimes, he outright admitted that effectively deracinating his restaurant was key to his triumphs. He told a New York Times reporter in 1974, “The minute I forgot I was Japanese, success began.”

In this sense, Benihana may function as a distant, faintly more sophisticated cousin of a Taco Bell or Panda Express, a restaurant that diluted a foreign culture’s tastes in a calculated bid to normalize it to a skeptical American public. The country has changed now; the landscape for Japanese cuisine has widened to encompass more than just sushi or teppanyaki. Today, one could call Aoki’s approach cynical for portraying his Japanese culture in deliberately broad strokes, but to deny his influence would be to deny that he opened a gateway for American consumers. Had Aoki never opened Benihana, it’s tempting to wonder whether you would be able to purchase sushi in corner stores with the same ease you can today, or, on the flip side, if you could go to a restaurant as steeply priced as Nobu Fifty Seven around the corner from Benihana’s flagship location on West 56th Street in Manhattan.

Depending on whom you ask, Rocky’s means of achieving success can read as either aspirational or cautionary, but through either lens is the ultimate assimilationist success story. The second he landed in America, Rocky was fueled by the engine of feverish capitalistic ambition, one he saw as fulfillment of the American dream. Before he was the patriarch of a family warring over his will, Rocky Aoki was America’s unlikely ambassador for Japanese cuisine, a 5-foot-4, jheri-curled former Olympic wrestler who arrived in America during a time when the word “Oriental” was still part of common parlance.

Rocky, born in October 1938, was 6 when America dropped bombs on Tokyo, leaving 100,000 dead and the city shell-shocked. The violence and its destruction turned the city’s inhabitants into “cave-people,” says his son Kevin. It was a city of people who were hiding underground as they tried to carry on.

“His father—my grandfather—wanted to create a restaurant where people would come back, smile, and become friends again,” Kevin tells me. So Yunosuke and Katsu opened a coffee shop, which functioned as a second home for Rocky. Growing up in the shadow of war, Kevin says, strengthened Rocky’s work ethic.

Yunosuke, a man descended from a samurai, was quite an entertainer himself. He reportedly taught himself how to tap dance by watching the movies of Fred Astaire, absorbing his skills osmotically. Though Yunosuke reportedly wanted Rocky to be the next Astaire, Rocky didn’t quite see that vision panning out. Rocky, a waggish miscreant of a kid, saw himself being closer in spirit to Elvis. From an early age, he had a preternatural gift for getting himself into trouble, whether through pushing kids down the stairs or selling magazine clippings of scantily clad women during school hours.

He and his school friends started a rock ’n’ roll band in high school called Rowdy Sounds, in which he played bass, but Rocky gave it up because he admittedly sucked at tempo. He routed his energies, instead, to wrestling, where he blossomed. He was an unusually gifted wrestler, one who “found he could lick every boy in his Tokyo high school in 1957,” per a public relations document Benihana circulated in April 1966.

He went off to college at Keio University in Tokyo, where he became the captain of the wrestling team, competing in the flyweight division at a wispy 114 pounds. After a year at Keio, his talents landed him a spot on Japan’s Olympic wrestling team, though he didn’t compete. Rocky earned a scholarship to Springfield College in Massachusetts, but transferred to CW Post College, now LIU Post, on Long Island after a few months.

Between 1959 and 1964, Rocky made money by working odd jobs; he was a dishwasher and busboy. His most lucrative gig, though, was selling ice cream in a Mister Softee truck. At first, he tried to sell his ice cream in lower Midtown Manhattan to mostly Caucasian kids, but he didn’t have much luck. No one would buy ice cream from him.

So he had an idea, explains Kevin: He’d just relocate to a neighborhood fellow ice cream truck drivers refused to venture into, maximizing his earnings by being a purveyor in an underserved community. So he parked in Harlem and blasted some Japanese music from his truck (this was just around the same time, after all, that Kyu Sakamoto’s wildly popular “Sukiyaki” would top American charts in 1963). He stuck small paper parasols in his ice cream. It was American ice cream draped in Japanese accoutrements, or what Americans at the time perceived markers of Japanese culture to be.

This shift in strategy worked wonders for Rocky, according to Kevin. “He had lines down the street for his truck,” he says. “People were waiting for this Japanese ice cream guy.” Rocky plastered the truck, too, with images and clippings from his wrestling days in a bid to deter anyone who dared touch him.

“I spent three years making a systematic analysis of the U.S. restaurant market,” Rocky once said in a business school case study about Benihana. “What I discovered is that Americans enjoy eating in exotic surroundings but are deeply mistrustful of exotic foods.” By the summer of 1963, Rocky had grown fully disillusioned with wrestling. (This feeling of disenchantment was expedited by the fact he broke one student’s leg and another’s nose and got himself expelled from CW Post College.) He began working toward an associate’s degree in restaurant management at New York City Technical College. School taught him quite a bit about what America was willing to stomach.

When Rocky came to the U.S. in 1959, residual anti-Japanese sentiment from the war lingered, and these prejudices extended to the food Americans chose to eat. It was a time, Kevin explains (though he wasn’t born at that point), when many Americans couldn’t fathom eating Japanese food, a cuisine once castigated as gross and undesirable by Western standards simply because it was foreign. “The only Japanese food that was out there was sushi and sukiyaki,” Kevin says. “Americans thought sushi was slimy, raw fish, stuff they’d never eat, like eating a cobra or scorpion is today.”

Initially resistant to his father’s pleas that Rocky open his own restaurant, he began toying with the idea, given what he learned about the market. Rocky called his dad up, according to Kevin, and asked him for some money and some help. Rocky then took over a space previously occupied by a failed Chinese restaurant on West 56th Street in Manhattan, nestled between 5th and 6th avenues.

Rocky avoided the pitfalls of bringing foreign traditions to an unwilling audience by meeting Americans where they were, so to speak. His self-mandate was to serve nothing slippery and nothing slimy. Instead, he would formulate “a restaurant version of hiring a karate expert to preside over a Memorial Day barbecue,” as Sasha Issenberg wrote in 2007’s The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy.

Rocky knew that Americans were hesitant, if not outright xenophobic, when it came to stuffing Japanese food down their gullets, so he futzed with the packaging. His plan of attack would be to take American favorites of steak, chicken, and shrimp and drizzle them with sauces made from sansho herbs and onions, dressing them quite literally in tastes that were palatable to churlish Americans, complete with a gloss of “exoticism.” What’d help these tastes go down easier, he figured, was to gift-wrap the experience in entertainment.

He opened the first Benihana location in May 1964, a block from what is today Trump Tower. He was 25. The restaurant had just four tables. The first few months were punishingly slow. He feared he was batting so far out of his league that he’d have to close the restaurant down for good. He didn’t have a liquor license. He had no money to hire a staff, let alone a public relations firm to help spread the word about the fact his Japanese steakhouse even existed.

Rocky’s mother rather charitably flew in from Japan to serve as one of his waitresses. His three brothers followed. There were typically very few customers in those days, five at lunch and 10 to 15 at dinner. Earnings were thus so meager that Rocky and his family took on other gigs to make ends meet. For one of his brothers, this lifestyle was untenable; he returned to Japan after a week. The restaurant was hemorrhaging money at a breakneck pace.

The woman who lifted the restaurant almost single-handedly from this early-hour nosedive was the late Clementine Paddleford, then the restaurant critic for The New York Herald Tribune. Paddleford was one of America’s most influential culinary gatekeepers, a food editor who commanded 12 million readers across the country at the apex of her career. She walked by the restaurant one night and was struck by the image she saw through the window, that of a man cooking for people directly at the table. It was unlike anything she’d ever seen in her three decades of reviewing restaurants.

Staffs treated Paddleford’s presence at their restaurants like an event: She contacted the restaurant owners beforehand and told them to order extra food and hire more help. Rocky took this warning to heart and worked hard to make the experience worthwhile for her.

His efforts paid off. In the pages of the Herald Tribune on May 9, 1964, Paddleford wrote of the restaurant with enchantingly experiential language, creating images of tables that were 10 feet long and 5 feet wide, spacious enough to accommodate rice, sauces, salad, and your bony elbows. In the middle of those tables was a long slab of metal “built over some sort of gas range affair” you couldn’t quite see—a restaurant as a magician’s lair. Waitresses in kimonos pour green tea while an “expert chef,” dressed in all white, with a green necktie and leather belt, looks “every inch a generalissimo of the kitchen.” She lovingly described the shrimp, turned and flipped until it “came to a tender deliciousness, delicately brown.” The restaurant, Paddleford argued, was at once unusual and wholly unique.

Paddleford passed away in November 1967, so she didn’t live long enough to visit again, though Benihana’s public relations flacks begged her to return. The review offered Rocky free publicity. Newspaper and television reporters flocked to his restaurant and were reportedly fascinated with the story of this wrestler turned restaurateur. Rocky found himself in the enviable position of having to constantly turn away customers, and, well, he figured they needed to go somewhere. He opened a second location at 120 E. 56th St., a mere three blocks away from the first, in May 1966.

“When he talked about himself, he talked about the restaurants, sake, women, boats, art, and Japanese festivals,” Cynthia Harris, one of Paddleford’s biographers, tells me of interviewing Rocky in 2005. “He did make it very clear that without Clementine Paddleford stumbling upon his restaurant, looking through the window and [getting] curious about this man cooking for people at the table, he probably wouldn’t have survived very long in the restaurant business. He spoke very passionately about her and was very grateful for her.”

Back then, the restaurant’s menu was relatively sparse: For $5, you could’ve gotten hibachi chicken with a mingle of vegetables, mostly mushrooms, scallions, and bean sprouts cooked in soy sauce. For $5.50, sukiyaki steak with vegetables. Hibachi steak with vegetables cost $6.50; for $6.75, filet mignon with vegetables. All meals came with rice, tea, an appetizer of hibachi shrimp, “onion au gratin à la Japanese” for a soup, and a Benihana salad bowl.

In these nascent years, Rocky made a point of staffing his restaurant with Japanese immigrants. Populating his restaurant with Japanese workers was important to him, a way of ensuring that he could offer his patrons what he defined as an “authentic” dining experience.

“It would be dishonest to call this an authentic Japanese eating place if everything did not actually come from Japan,” he said in an April 1966 press release, a month before opening his second restaurant. “And, besides, there are too many New Yorkers who are familiar with the real thing in Japan and would spot imitations immediately.”

The original location where Rocky Aoki opened his first Benihana on that stretch of 56th Street still stands, though it’s considerably more expansive than that initial compact post. It’s now a two-tiered, cavernous playground, stationed in a section of Manhattan’s Midtown so suffocatingly crowded that the mere experience of walking two blocks from the subway to the restaurant could very well make you an agoraphobe.

The air inside is sticky with grime and sweat, as if each room has been outfitted with a Glade PlugIn of seafood. The downstairs is styled like an airport bar as what sounds like generic, bootleg club music blares in the background. Upstairs, you and your party are seated with groups of strangers. The restaurant menu is stuffed with names for dishes that read like failed Bath & Body Works products: Splash ’N Meadow. Land ’N Sea. Ocean Treasure.

Still, the restaurant’s advertised attractions inspire a certain thrill: A genial chef subjects raw shrimp to an avalanche of butter before you. He shapes a pile of white rice into a heart before he fries it. He morphs a stack of onion rings into a tiny volcano. He is totally game throughout as he endures the peculiar humiliation of having to subject his patrons to puns, tossing butter in the air and showing you a “butterfly.” Dining at Benihana is disorientingly pleasant; the experience is over after roughly an hour and a half.

Rocky is no longer around to pontificate about his restaurant’s influence on the way America eats and imagines Japanese food today, but his family understands his legacy intimately. “Beyond just the cuisine, he opened the door for other Japanese people to be part of a rich, American culture,” DJ Steve Aoki, one of Rocky’s other sons, says. “And to bring more color and diversity into the business ecosystem in the United States in a time when it was very difficult.” Rocky worked against the perception of otherness that could have very well deterred him, and America’s understanding of Japanese cuisine became more granular as a direct result of his foresight. The ideals that Rocky and his new home had in common opened the doors to success, recalling what biographer Jack McCallum called Rocky’s unwavering “belief in the American free enterprise system.”

Despite the drawn-out battle over Rocky’s will that resulted in only two of his children receiving the inheritance, Kevin maintains that his children have flourished regardless through staying true to the blueprint his father created for them. Kevin and Steve’s recollections of their father contradict the widely circulated image of a man who was pompous and self-obsessed, with a life riddled in scandal and absurdity. “He was a humble man,” Steve says. “He never spoke about himself like, I did this, I did that.” Perhaps he never had to articulate what he was witnessing in real time. Rocky lived long enough to see American revulsion and intolerance for Japanese cuisine transform into reverence.

Strains of Rocky’s culinary legacy live on in his family: Kevin is the proprietor of his own restaurant development company he founded after assisting his father with Benihana in various high-level corporate roles. In early July, Steve launched a delivery-only pizza service, Pizzaoki, in Los Angeles and reportedly has plans to expand beyond the city. Kevin laments that his father wasn’t able to witness the extent of what some of his children have accomplished in the decade since his death.

“One of the things that I wish my dad were to see in his lifetime was the success of Steven,” Kevin tells me. “He passed away not seeing what Steven has done, or what I have done.”

One could read his children’s endeavors as extensions of Rocky’s own belligerently capitalistic interpretation of the American dream, one that holds its own, odd allure. Kevin closes our conversation with one more story about his father: When Rocky was still living Japan, his father Yunosuke told stories about the United States, a land so rich with opportunity that one could find $20 bills discarded on the ground while wandering the streets. And sure enough, as the family legend goes, you may never quite believe what Rocky found on the sidewalk during one of his first days in America.

Mayukh Sen is a James Beard Award–winning food writer based in New York.