Fish Tale: Las Vegas couple mix cultures, personalities at Japanese restaurant

Ken Miller

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 | 8:16 a.m.

Mary Beth and Toshiaki Horiai have laid the ground rules of their marriage pretty firmly: He cooks. She doesn't.

Obviously there's much more to their marriage than that, but when you've recently opened a restaurant, as the Horiais have, that dynamic can become slightly more emphasized.

"It's a very touchy subject," Mary Beth, 43, said, laughing. "Our poor children." But Toshiaki, 47, has kept a sense of humor about the arrangement. When asked how often his wife cooks, he looked at her slyly and said, in limited English, "No, never. Forever."

"It's my goal in life to be cooked for," Mary Beth added.

"And just to eat," Toshiaki added with a smile, getting a slight punch in the arm in the process.

Ultimately it's not a problem for the couple, who complement each other well at Koto Japanese Restaurant, which they opened at the Eastern Promenade near the intersection of Eastern and Serene avenues five months ago.

Toshiaki is only too happy to prepare all the meals. He's been a chef for more than 20 years, and has long dreamed of owning a restaurant.

And Mary Beth, who has limitless stamina from her years as a dancer, handles management of the business.

They get plenty of help from their two daughters, Emi, 18, and Miki, 16, as well as a staff of four full-time and five part-time employees.

The one-room restaurant is sparsely but tastefully decorated. On one wall hang "pillars," pieces of fabric with wooden rods at the ends, which were created by Toshiaki. On the other are long, narrow mirrors with bamboo frames. Silk flowers are displayed throughout the room.

A sushi bar with a balsic black granite countertop overlooks 13 tables. The walls are two-tone earth colors, a motif that is continued in the stamped-concrete floor. Koto's menu includes nasu torimiso (eggplant and chicken with miso sauce), gindara (black cod miso), foil chicken and salmon, and hamachi pepa (sashimi with garlic ponzu sauce).

The couple have seen their share of highs and lows it took five years of hard work to save enough money to open their restaurant but they've maintained their sense of humor, something their customers seem to appreciate.

"Most of our business is repeat," Mary Beth said.

And working together for the first time in their 18 years of marriage has been almost as rewarding as opening the restaurant, Mary Beth said.

"The thing I like best about this is working with my husband," she said. "It has its challenges, but we had to get to a point in our relationship to be mature enough to handle it."

Toshiaki agreed.

"It's no problem," he said, laughing slightly. He then spoke in Japanese, and Mary Beth, interpreting for him, said, "Because we've been married 18 years."

Gotta dance

Restaurants were not a big part of Mary Beth's childhood. Dancing was her passion. "I would dance with my father when my family threw parties, and I watched The Lawrence Welk Show' with my parents," she said. "I liked Bobby and Cissy and the tap dancer Arthur Duncan."

Mary Beth, whose maiden name is Flahive, learned jazz and tap at an early age and joined anything involving dance. While attending elementary school in her hometown of Buena Park, Calif., she staged her own shows for neighborhood children. In high school she joined productions such as "Oklahoma" and "Guys and Dolls," and became the leader of the drill team.

The only exposure she had to food growing up was her mother Peggy's cooking, especially her chicken and broccoli, "which she still makes for me when I visit." (Her father, Tom, died four years ago at age 78.)

After graduation Mary Beth pursued dancing, traveling to Japan for a Las Vegas-style revue show in a resort hotel two hours outside Tokyo.

"My audition went well, but I had braces at the time and they weren't going to hire me," she remembers. "My girlfriend explained to them I'd have them off by the time the show started, so they hired me."

Eastern exposure

Mary Beth continued with the same company for three more years, spending six months in Japan and six months in the United States. While stateside, Mary Beth studied Japanese at junior college and worked at Japanese restaurants.

"I became interested in the language," she said.

After her third year with the company Mary Beth took a year off from dance and fully immersed herself in the language, taking classes at Sophia University in Tokyo.

She then returned to dancing, performing in a six-month contract in Japan.

It was on that contract that Mary Beth met Las Vegas choreographer Minnie Madden, and the two became good friends. When De-An Dancers, the company Mary Beth danced for, stopped doing shows, Madden had an idea.

"She suggested we start our own company to produce shows," Mary Beth said. Minnie Madden Productions was formed in 1985, and their first contract was at a small hotel in Japan.

"The act was four dancers and a singer, but we couldn't find a singer, so I went," Mary Beth said. She sang in some of her high school productions and had been singing since her second year in Japan. That first booking was the beginning of a fruitful relationship with Madden, who now owns and operates the Las Vegas-based Call Back trade publication. It was also when Mary Beth met her future husband.

Chance meeting

With his wife interpreting for him, Toshiaki explained how he became interested in cooking while growing up in Iwate, Japan.

"His mother became ill, and so he had to help with the cooking," Mary Beth said.

By the time he graduated high school, he wanted to be a chef, and he worked at a bank for three years saving up money so he could attend a cooking school. He attended Moranbon Cooking School in Japan for one year and began his apprenticeship in 1978.

By 1985, the year he met Mary Beth, Toshiaki was an established chef, having worked at numerous restaurants throughout Japan. He worked at the hotel where Mary Beth was performing.

Mary Beth was indeed looking for a boyfriend that year, but not someone for her.

"One of my friends had just broken up with her boyfriend, and I was checking on chefs for her, because chefs mean food," she said, laughing. "I found Toshiaki and recommended him to her. She said, 'If he's so great, why don't you date him?' So I did."

Mary Beth began by bringing Toshiaki strawberries while he played mah jongg with his co-workers in the break room.

"I was sitting next to him, and one of the chefs said, 'When are you two going on a date?' I said, 'Whenever he asks me,' " Mary Beth remembers. "A few minutes later he asked."

It wasn't long before Toshiaki took her home to meet his parents.

Mary Beth remembers the event well.

"They didn't know I was white," she said. "He should have warned them. Add to that I had blonde, short spiked hair and studded boots. Hey, it was the '80s.

"They disguised their surprise very well on the first visit," she said. But when it became clear Mary Beth and Toshiaki were serious, things changed quickly.

"They were jumping, screaming, (saying) 'Oh my God, oh my God,' " Toshiaki said. "They said it a hundred times."

It wasn't that Toshiaki's parents didn't like her, Mary Beth said -- it was that marrying an American meant he would be leaving.

"His mother didn't speak to him until his passport arrived at the house months later," Mary Beth said. "But as soon as they saw their grandchildren, everything was forgotten."

Mary Beth and Toshiaki moved stateside in 1986 and were married later that year in Buena Park, Calif. -- in her sister Meighan's backyard. They made a video of the wedding for Toshiaki's parents, who have never been out of Japan and never been on an airplane.

"We keep trying to get them over here," Mary Beth said. "If we can get them on a plane it will be a small miracle."

Mary Beth continued to work with Madden on the Japan shows, but when Emi was born in 1986, Mary Beth wanted stability. She and Toshiaki moved to Las Vegas in 1987 so she could work with Madden.

The next few years were spent hopping around the country. The family spent six months in Seattle in 1988 (they left after "six months of rain," Mary Beth remembers) and moved to Hawaii later that year when Toshiaki had the chance to help open a restaurant on Oahu.

By 1989, however, Mary Beth began to miss her family, and a visit from Madden brought them back to Las Vegas.

"She asked me to please come back," Mary Beth said. "It was perfect timing."

This time the couple decided they wanted to make the move permanent. They bought a house, Toshiaki found work as a chef at Hamada at the Flamingo Las Vegas and Mary Beth started up shows with Madden.

It was also when they decided they wanted to own their own business.

Devastating blow

Mary Beth's Hawaii experience convinced her to get a real-estate license in 1990. "I thought about it all the time there because the housing market went up so much."

Her career was short-lived -- she sold only one house -- but she developed a healthy list of contacts in the industry, one of whom expressed interest in putting up the money so she and Toshiaki could set up their own restaurant.

"We were so excited," she said.

But after months of preparation on Toshiaki's part, the couple received bad news.

"Turns out he didn't have the money," she said. "The disappointment made my husband sick."

So sick, in fact, that he moved back to Japan to be with his family, and Mary Beth joined him three months later after unsuccessfully trying to sell their house.

During that three-month period, Mary Beth started another production company, Show Biz, with Helen Morrison, one of the dancers in her productions. Once she moved to Japan, Mary Beth began bringing shows there, appearing in many of them (Madden continued with her business in Las Vegas).

Show Biz was successful from the start. "We did more than 60 shows over a nine-year period," Mary Beth said. "We were even on TV over there -- talk shows, quiz shows, commercials."

Toshiaki eventually got over his disappointment and began working again at a variety of restaurants. In 1997, Morrison got married and Mary Beth started choreographing shows on her own, including a children's musical that became an annual tradition -- even when she and Toshiaki moved back to Las Vegas in 1999.

The move back to the United States seemed necessary for several reasons, Mary Beth said.

"The academic pressure in Japan is higher, and we didn't want our girls going through that," she said. "And we wanted a house bigger than a two-bedroom apartment."

And, perhaps most important, Toshiaki still wanted to own his own restaurant.

"That became our goal from then on," Mary Beth said. Toshiaki got a job at Bellagio, and the couple decided he'd work there five years, "at which point he'd be vested in the company," she said.

Five-year plan

For the first two years back Mary Beth raised her children and didn't work. That all changed in 2001 when the couple sold their house and moved into a bigger one.

"I always told him I would get a job if we bought a bigger house," she said. Mary Beth got a job as a server at Nobu at the Hard Rock Hotel. Part of her paycheck went toward the mortgage, and the rest she saved for a down payment on their own restaurant.

Their five-year plan came to fruition in 2004. They took a brief trip to France that year "because we knew we probably wouldn't be able to go once we opened a restaurant," Mary Beth said. Upon their return, they found the property they wanted in two weeks.

They named the restaurant after the koto, a 13-string Japanese harp that Mary Beth and her daughters have been studying for the last four years.

Mary Beth has curtailed her involvement in dance since opening the restaurant, but she said the decision wasn't tough.

"It was just a natural consequence of events, and my husband supported me for so long. Now it's time to support him," she said. "Besides, I'm not young anymore. My body's starting to ache."

She still gets to enjoy dancing, but on a different level: Both her daughters are active in dance in school, and perform once or twice a month with a hip-hop team they created.

"They're better than I ever was," she said. "I get such joy out of watching them."

Toshiaki takes nothing for granted in business and in life. He's worked at 14 restaurants since becoming a chef, and knows how fragile the business can be. (He briefly lost his job after 9/11, but was rehired a week later.)

The Horiai's marriage is indeed a partnership. Toshiaki wanted to keep his restaurant open seven days a week, but agreed on six so he could spend more time with his family.

When asked if he had any plans to expand, he turned to Mary Beth and said, "How about you?"

Apart from working with his family, Toshiaki's greatest joy is seeing his customers happy, his wife said.

"If he can serve them delicious food, it's worth it," Mary Beth said, again translating for Toshiaki. "And he can eat the leftovers."

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