Picture New York’s East Village on an autumn afternoon, the sun setting on dirty and chipped pavement below old, red brick buildings with black fire escapes on the facades. Three boys try to identify flags that hang from a restaurant’s wooden shed on the side of the road. Down the street, a group sips matcha lattes at small, metal-framed tables.
The front door to one of these buildings opens, and Bon Yagi rushes out — walking past the group drinking tea at the store he owns, past the small and empty wooden tables at a sake bar that he also owns, and past the bank on the corner at the end of the block. A true New Yorker, his steps are brisk, his gaze is focused.
Yagi, 73, is head of T.I.C. Restaurant Group, and wields a quiet but immeasurable influence over how New Yorkers understand and consume Japanese cuisine. Born in 1948 as Shuji Yagi, he arrived in the city in the mid-1970s and opened his first Japanese restaurant, Hasaki (named after his hometown of Hasaki, Ibaraki Prefecture), in 1984, selling affordable sushi among the East Village’s no-frills, 24-hour Ukrainian diners.