By Miguel Otárola

Copyright denverpost

Chef Toshi Kizaki arrived early to the Michelin Guide’s award ceremony for Colorado restaurants last week, held at an event space near Empower Field at Mile High. By the end of the night, he stood at the head of the throng of chefs, owners and managers honored by the French food and travel guide. He’d traded the white chef’s jacket he’d arrived in for one bearing a patch of the Michelin man. His newest restaurant, Kizaki, had won a star.

Achieving that recognition wasn’t even possible until Michelin began rating restaurants in Colorado in 2023. But once it did, Toshi, who opened his first restaurant, Sushi Den, with his brother Yasu 41 years ago, decided he wanted his next concept to win a star. “When I opened [Kizaki], I had James Beard and a Michelin in my mind,” he told The Denver Post a day after the ceremony.

Kizaki, at 1551 S. Pearl St. in Denver’s Platt Park neighborhood, is centered around a nine-seat omakase-style sushi counter, where Toshi and his team cook and present roughly 20 small courses for each guest. Raw, cured, seared and dry-aged fish arrive one after the other; a recent menu also included sea urchin, savory egg custard with snow crab and marbled tofu. He explains to customers how each was prepared through an interpreter on his staff.

The restaurant opened just five months ago and has two seatings per night. (There are two small rooms nearby, each hosting groups of up to six.)

The award is a late-career peak for Toshi, who said he is six months shy of turning 70.

He began his work as a chef in Tokyo and established himself in Denver after responding to a job opening in the newspaper classifieds in 1979, he said.

Five years later, he and Yasu opened Sushi Den, at 1487 S. Pearl St., which would become a destination for generations of Denver families. In the ensuing decades, they added two adjacent restaurants, Izakaya Den and Ototo. A brother in Japan, Koichi, sources fish and ships it overseas to Denver. Toshi also collaborated on the Michelin-recommended Temaki Den at the Source Hotel in RiNo.

Omakase-style dinners weren’t well-known when Toshi launched a chef’s counter inside Sushi Den about 15 years ago. He said he believed its time would come.

About ten years ago, Toshi purchased property on South Pearl Street. He demolished the existing building and built a new estate he named Denchu. Tucked inside are two intimate chef’s counter restaurants and a large dining room and bar facing the street.

Toshi uses his counter to prepare sushi in the edomae tradition of Tokyo, quickly, with his bare hands and using simple ingredients. This approach differs from Sushi Den, where people order off of a vast menu.

Toshi drew a blunt comparison: “Sushi Den is American-ized, you know? This one is not.”

Still, it’s challenging to garner the trust of American diners, something he said he knows from decades of keen observation. Toshi wants regulars, though, so at Kizaki, he’ll still modify a traditional Japanese dish to make it more relatable to customers, he said.

The thoughtful and exclusive experience — dining at Kizaki costs $225 a person, and Toshi sends guests home with a signed menu — is similar in some ways to that of other Colorado restaurants the Michelin Guide recognized this year, including Boulder’s Frasca Food and Wine and Denver’s The Wolf Tailor, the latter earning two stars. The guide’s inspectors focus not just on the quality of ingredients and food, but on whether a chef’s unique point of view is expressed through their platess.

“A lot of people think I’m a business person, but I’m not,” he said. “I’m a chef. That’s my mindset.”

In its description, Michelin described the restaurant as “luxurious” and noted how “the menu alternates between small dishes like gorgeously marbled black-and-white sesame tofu and nigiri carefully crafted by Chef Kizaki himself. Exceptional ingredient quality is a given from start to finish, spanning a treasure trove of oceanic delicacies, from buttery, lightly seared black-throat sea perch to silvery, vinegar-accented gizzard shad.”

One of the dishes prepared at Kizaki, chef Toshi Kizaki’s omakase counter that opened in Denver in 2025. Kizaki specializes in the traditional “edomae” sushi of Tokyo. (Photo by Casey Wilson/Provided by BON Communications)The Michelin star was a surprise, given Kizaki had been open for less than a year, Toshi said. Even more of a surprise was that the restaurant that ultimately opened in Denchu’s dining room and spare chef’s counter, Margot, had also earned a star.

“That’s the lucky part,” he said. “But other than that, I knew I’d get it someday. I thought [it would be] the next year.”

He’d once called Kizaki his “vision of retirement.” He still plans on working “for a while,” even if plantar fasciitis, foot pain developed from years of standing in kitchens, means he has to rest more in between, he said.

This winter, he plans to return to Japan for the holidays, he said. There, in Fukuoka, not far from his hometown, he would like to reunite with friend and fellow chef Keiji Nakazawa, whose New York City restaurant Sushi Sho has two Michelin stars.

And though he spends most of his time these days at Kizaki, he said he’d like to display the Michelin Guide’s star — a red trophy in the shape of a clover — at Sushi Den, where his Denver journey began.

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