The bar even had a conveyor belt-system of wooden boats that brought sushi to customers. The restaurant’s signature sushi program began in 1983, after it opened its first-in-Ottawa sushi bar on its upper level. When Suisha Gardens opened, it served traditional Japanese dishes, including shabu shabu and yakitori, but not the sushi that it later became known for. As part of the restaurant’s decor, water trickling down crevices and around raised rocks in the downstairs dining area, which is filled with tatami rooms and private spaces. The Slater Street restaurant still has its huge water wheel outside its entrance. “Suisha motivated him to succeed in business.” For him, it represented energy,” Lisa said. Teshima chose a water wheel a symbol for his restaurant because it reminded him of his youth, when he would mill rice and flour at a water wheel-powered mill, said his daughter, Lisa Teshima. Teshima struck out on his own to Suisha Gardens in 1974. The first of Ottawa’s Japanese restaurants, Japanese Village opened on Laurier Avenue a few years before Suisha Gardens did, and is still open. Not long after Teshima arrived, while he was working at the Kobe Steak House in Vancouver, he was recruited to work at Japanese Village in Ottawa. Teshima said he grew up a poor farm boy in the south of Japan and came to Vancouver in 1968 with $712 to his name. The closure of C’est Japon à Suisha will be a sad milestone in the stories of two Japanese immigrants whose efforts pioneered Japanese food, and sushi in particular, in Ottawa. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.” This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. But after his landlord decided not to extend his lease, that notion was scuttled. The reason, he said in an interview, is that C’est Japon à Suisha, as Suisha Gardens is now called, is to make way for a condominium development.Īrai said he had intended to step back and pass on C’est Japon à Suisha to a veteran employee. Now 63, Arai is coming up on 42 years with the business.īut Arai, who goes by “Mike”, announced this week on his restaurant’s website that it is to close July 1. In the mid-1990s, Arai bought the restaurant from Teshima. Then Arai moved to Ottawa in September 1981 and started as a bartender, doing the same job he had done at Narita International Airport, east of Tokyo. Photo by ERROL MCGIHON / ERROL MCGIHONĪrai got his landed immigrant status, as Teshima suggested. Arai was eventually hired and started working at the restaurant in 1981, when he was in his early 20s. Rejection letters that C’est Japon a Suisha owner Mike Arai received from previous owner Frank Tashima. He still has his correspondence with Teshima. It took almost one and a half years,” he said. He wanted more great experiences.įrank Teshima, then the owner of Suisha Gardens on Slater Street, refused Arai’s initial request, and then another, and then another.īut Arai was persistent. “I had such a great experience in North America,” Arai said. Why the wanderlust? In 1977, Arai had spent three weeks learning English in Boston and loved it.
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