Dining: 50 years of Fuji Ya
When Fuji Ya opened in meat-and-potatoes downtown Minneapolis in December 1959, the city's first Japanese restaurant must have seemed wildly exotic. By the late 1960s, owner Reiko Weston moved her business to a derelict stretch of the Mississippi riverfront -- proximity to water and a bridge were Japanese good-luck signs -- and in the process made an indelible mark on the local restaurant scene. Weston's daughter, Carol Hanson, co-owner of the reincarnated Fuji Ya, looks back at her family's half-century of hospitality.
Q Do you have any memories of the first Fuji Ya on 9th and LaSalle?
A I was born in 1961, so I don't, no. I've always said that the restaurant was my mom's first baby, but I was her first child. Mom and Dad divorced when I was 6 or 7, and as kids [Hanson's brother, Michael, is two years younger], we didn't see much of her. If we wanted to see her, we went to the restaurant. When I got older -- by that time, the restaurant had moved to the river -- my memories are about working, all the time.
Q No one in your family had food service in their backgrounds, so why a restaurant?
A My mom and dad needed to find something for my grandma and grandpa to do. Mom was at the University of Minnesota, getting her degree in math and psychology, and Dad worked for a computer company. But the restaurant -- even as a 25-seater in the basement, next to the old YMCA -- got so big so fast that Mom had to quit school because they needed the help. My grandfather would seat people, and he would make little origami animals for the children. He died in 1963. His name was Kaoru Umetani. My grandmother's name was Nobuko Umetani. She cooked. She spoke no English. "Holy cow" and "holy mackerel" was the only English my grandmother knew.
Q By the late 1960s your mother traded up to a much larger, far more elegant space on the riverfront. It was really something, wasn't it?
A When she moved the restaurant in 1967, I mean, there was nothing there. It wasn't a nice neighborhood. We had a wishing well downstairs, and bums would sneak in and fish coins out of the water. We'd have to yell, "Get out of here." Mom chose it because it was on the river -- that was a good-luck sign -- and you could see a bridge from there, which was another good-luck sign.
Q That restaurant was the home for a lot of firsts, wasn't it?
A We were the first restaurant in Minneapolis to do sushi. That was in the early 1980s. We hired an absolutely fabulous sushi chef from Tokyo. His name was Nobuya Yokoyama, but we called him Bu-Chan. He was very talented, and very temperamental.
We were also the first Twin Cities restaurant to offer teppanyaki. That's why Benihana wouldn't come here right away, because we had already cornered the market.
Q When did the restaurant close?
A Mom died in May of 1988, and the restaurant closed in 1990. Ten years prior to Mom's death, she had a stroke. I learned a lot about my mom and about the restaurant in those 10 years, from when I was 16 to when I was 26.
Q Your mother owned a number of restaurants, didn't she?
A There was Taiga. My mom loved that restaurant. She put her heart and soul into it. We did Indonesian buffets on Sunday.
At Fuji International, my mom wanted to create a place for students. It was a cafeteria on the West Bank. The food was inexpensive and it was good.
Then there was Fuji Express, on the skyway level downtown. It was open from 11 to 2 on weekdays. The most expensive item on the menu was $3.29. We had it for a year; I worked there every day.
Q You got back into the business and revived the Fuji Ya name. Why?
A We opened in 1997, after a six-year hiatus. I went back to college, I got married, we had a couple of kids. I realized I needed to do more, and my husband needed to do more. There was a German restaurant at 27th and Lyndale, Mitterhauser. He wanted to sell, and we liked the location, so we thought, "Why not?"
I haven't been in the restaurant business for a couple of years now. My husband, Tom, is doing it, and I've been doing the three children. That's a full-time job, and then some. Sometimes I wish I was at work and Tom was at home with the kids [laughs]. I go to the restaurant to eat. It's very novel [laughs].
