Jiro Ono

Some chefs spend a career chasing novelty. Jiro Ono spent his chasing the same twenty pieces of nigiri until they came as close to perfect as human hands can manage. From a basement counter in Ginza with room for exactly ten guests, the Tokyo sushi master turned Sukiyabashi Jiro into the most talked about sushi restaurant on the planet, and he did it with four things: rice, vinegar, fish and a refusal to ever consider the job finished.

Born in 1925 and still turning up at the counter after his hundredth birthday, Ono is the chef who put the word shokunin, the craftsman devoted to a single skill for a lifetime, into the global food vocabulary. He was the first sushi chef anywhere to hold three Michelin stars, the subject of a documentary that rewired how the West thinks about raw fish, and the man who served Barack Obama a lunch the president later called the best sushi he had ever eaten.

TL;DR

• Japanese sushi chef, born 27 October 1925 in Tenryū, Shizuoka Prefecture, and founder of Sukiyabashi Jiro in Ginza, Tokyo.
• Opened Sukiyabashi Jiro in 1965 in the basement of the Tsukamoto Sogyo Building, where the ten-seat counter still stands today.
• In 2007 it became the first sushi restaurant in the world to be awarded three Michelin stars, a rating it carried through the 2019 guide.
• Star of David Gelb’s 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the film that introduced Edomae nigiri to a worldwide audience.
• Named a Contemporary Master Craftsman in 2005, awarded the Medal with Yellow Ribbon in 2014, and recognised by Guinness World Records in 2019 as the oldest head chef of a three Michelin star restaurant.
• Turned 100 on 27 October 2025 and said he intends to keep working; his elder son Yoshikazu Ono has run the Ginza kitchen since 2023.

Jiro Ono key facts

Jiro Ono: career timeline

From a Shizuoka inn to a Tokyo counter

The story does not begin in a kitchen. It begins in Tenryū, a river town in Shizuoka Prefecture that is now part of Hamamatsu, where Jiro Ono was born on 27 October 1925. In 1932, at the age of seven, he went to work at a local inn called Fukudaya. Seven. Most children that age are learning to tie their shoes; Ono was learning that a job is something you finish before you rest.

A childhood that never really had a holiday

He has spoken often about how little his early life resembled anyone else’s idea of growing up. There was no cushion behind him, no family business waiting, no safety net if he stopped. In 1941, aged sixteen, he was sent to a munitions factory in Yokohama, and in the last year of the war he was assigned to a unit in Toyohashi. When the war ended he went back to Fukudaya, then trained in Japanese cuisine at a restaurant in Hamamatsu, quietly building the foundation of a palate that would later be described as the most exacting in Tokyo.

That start explains a great deal about the chef he became. The discipline at Sukiyabashi Jiro was never a performance of severity for the cameras. It was simply how a man who began working at seven understood what work is.

Learning Edomae the long way

The turning point came in 1951. A customer he had met during his Hamamatsu years introduced him to Yoshino, a sushi house in Kyobashi that sat alongside Kyubey and Nakata among the great traditional counters of central Tokyo. Ono was twenty-five, which by the standards of the trade made him a late starter, and he threw himself at the craft with the appetite of someone making up lost ground.

Edomae sushi, the style he learned there, is Tokyo’s own. It grew out of the food stalls of the city in the 1820s, when there was no refrigeration and every topping had to be cured, simmered, marinated or aged so that it could be eaten safely and taste better for the treatment. Vinegar, salt, kombu, soy and time were the tools. A chef in that tradition is not simply slicing raw fish; he is deciding, for every single piece of seafood, exactly what it needs and exactly how long it needs it.

By 1954 Ono had impressed his master enough to be sent to Osaka as head chef of Midori Sushi, running a counter of his own while still in his twenties. He spent another decade in the trade before deciding he was ready to put his own name above a door.

1965: the basement counter that became a pilgrimage

In 1965 Ono opened Sukiyabashi Jiro on the basement floor of the Tsukamoto Sogyo Building at 4-2-15 Ginza, in Chūō ward. It is worth pausing on that address, because it is a large part of the legend. This is not a grand dining room. There are ten seats at a plain wooden counter, no starters, no dessert trolley, no view. Guests sit down, and pieces of nigiri arrive one at a time, placed in front of them by hand, to be eaten within seconds while the rice is still at the temperature the chef intended.

The restaurant grew a second counter at Nihonbashi Takashimaya in 1973, and by 1994 the International Herald Tribune was ranking it the sixth best restaurant in the world, an extraordinary placement for a ten-seat sushi bar in a basement. Word spread among chefs long before it spread among tourists. Joël Robuchon called it one of his favourite restaurants anywhere and said it taught him that sushi is an art rather than a dish.

Three stars, one film, and the world at the door

In 2007, when the Michelin Guide published its first Tokyo edition, Sukiyabashi Jiro received three stars. No sushi restaurant had ever held that rating before, and the news travelled far beyond the food press: a ten-seat basement counter had just been placed on the same tier as the grandest kitchens in France. The restaurant carried three stars every year through the 2019 guide. It later stopped appearing in the guide because it no longer takes bookings from the general public, with reservations handled through luxury hotel concierges instead, a practical consequence of demand rather than any judgement on the cooking.

Then came the film. David Gelb’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi, released in 2011, followed an 85-year-old Ono through his working day and did something no review had managed: it made the process visible. Audiences who had never eaten a piece of Edomae nigiri watched an apprentice spend years on the egg course alone, and watched a man in his eighties say that he still had not reached perfection.

What the documentary really showed

The film is often remembered for its austerity, but what stays with most viewers is the affection underneath it. Ono talks about falling in love with his work, about the pleasure of a guest’s face at the right moment, about the fish dealers at Tsukiji who each specialise in a single species and whom he trusts absolutely. It is a film about a supply chain as much as a chef: the tuna buyer, the shrimp man, the rice merchant who will not sell his best grade to anyone else because nobody else knows how to cook it.

Ono has also used his platform for something less comfortable. He and his sons have warned repeatedly that overfishing threatens the very ingredients Edomae sushi depends on, and that the fish available to a young chef today is not the fish he learned on.

Inside a twenty-minute meal

A meal at Sukiyabashi Jiro is famously brief. Twenty pieces or so, served at a pace set entirely by the chef, often finished in half an hour. That compression is the point. Nothing sits, nothing waits, nothing cools.

The rice comes first

Ask sushi chefs what they took from Ono and most of them say the same thing: the shari. He seasons his rice with aged akazu, a red vinegar made from sake lees, which brings a rounded sweetness and depth without any added sugar. The rice is then held close to body temperature, roughly 37 degrees Celsius, so that it meets a cool slice of fish and effectively melts against it. Serving rice that warm was not the norm when he started, and it is now something close to an article of faith at serious counters.

His nigiri technique follows the same logic. The rice is packed firmly at the edges and left loose in the centre, so the piece holds together on the journey from his hand to yours and then collapses the moment it is eaten. The preparation behind each topping is just as deliberate: octopus massaged for something like forty minutes and served warm so that it is tender rather than rubbery, tuna aged for days until it gives up its full flavour, small fish cured to the minute.

Two sons, two counters

Both of Ono’s sons became sushi chefs, which in a trade built on apprenticeship is a story in itself. Yoshikazu, the elder, spent decades at his father’s side in Ginza and has run the restaurant since 2023, when Ono stepped back from its daily management. Anyone who saw the documentary will remember the weight of that position: the son who buys the fish, who cooks the rice, who does the work while the name above the door belongs to someone else.

Takashi, the younger son, was given the traditional permission to leave and build his own place. In 2003 he opened a Sukiyabashi Jiro in Roppongi, which went on to earn two Michelin stars of its own. Between them the family holds three counters and a house style that has quietly shaped a generation of sushi chefs across Tokyo and, through alumni of the kitchen, well beyond Japan.

One hundred years old and still at the counter

On 27 October 2025 Jiro Ono turned 100. A month earlier, on Respect for the Aged Day, he was presented with a certificate by Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike and told reporters he planned to keep going for about five more years. Asked for the secret to his health, he gave an answer that could serve as a summary of his whole life: he can no longer come to the restaurant every day, but he still tries to work whenever he can, because he believes work is the best medicine there is.

These days he makes sushi mainly for special guests, since his hands do not move the way they once did. That he makes it at all, seventy-five years after qualifying as a sushi chef, is the kind of detail that turns a very good chef into a permanent reference point. Japanese cuisine has produced many masters. It has produced very few people who kept asking, at ninety and at a hundred, whether today’s rice was quite right.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch Jiro Ono

See Jiro in action in this video.

Signature dishes

The Sukiyabashi Jiro omakase is the signature, and within it a handful of pieces have become reference points for sushi chefs everywhere. The octopus is massaged for around forty minutes and served warm, a treatment that turns a famously chewy ingredient into something yielding and sweet. The tuna, bought from a dealer who handles nothing else, is aged until its flavour opens up. Kohada, the small gizzard shad that Edomae chefs use to judge one another, is cured with salt and vinegar to the exact minute. Steamed abalone, simmered clam and lightly cooked prawn all carry the marks of a tradition built before refrigeration existed. And the meal closes, as it always has, with tamagoyaki: a sweet, custard-like block of egg that apprentices at the restaurant famously spend years learning to make well enough to serve.

Cookbooks

Jiro is the author of books including Sushi: Jiro Gastronomy.

Personal life

Ono has two sons, Yoshikazu and Takashi, who both followed him into sushi. He has lived and worked in Tokyo since the early 1950s and has spoken over the years about how completely the restaurant absorbed his life, to the point that days off felt like an interruption rather than a rest. He is known among regulars for his memory of who is sitting where, adjusting the size of each piece to the guest in front of him, and among chefs for a work ethic that has become a kind of shorthand. His enthusiasms outside the counter are modest: classical music, and the daily walk to the Ginza subway that took him to work for decades.

Jiro in context

Jiro Ono is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Jet Tila and Anne Burrell.

Follow Jiro Ono

Jiro Ono — official · Instagram

Jiro Ono FAQ

How old is Jiro Ono?
He was born on 27 October 1925 and turned 100 on 27 October 2025, making him 100 years old in 2026.

Where is Jiro Ono’s restaurant?
Sukiyabashi Jiro is on the basement floor of the Tsukamoto Sogyo Building at 4-2-15 Ginza, Chūō ward, Tokyo. It has ten counter seats and has been at the same address since 1965.

Is Jiro Ono still making sushi?
Yes, although not every day. He stepped back from the daily running of the restaurant in 2023 and his elder son Yoshikazu now leads the kitchen, but Ono still serves sushi to special guests and said around his hundredth birthday that he wants to keep working.

Why is Jiro Ono famous?
He was the first sushi chef in the world to hold three Michelin stars, awarded to Sukiyabashi Jiro in 2007, and he became internationally known through the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

What makes his sushi different?
His rice is seasoned with aged akazu red vinegar and served close to body temperature, and every topping is cured, aged or simmered in the Edomae tradition before it ever touches the rice.

Who runs Sukiyabashi Jiro now?
His elder son Yoshikazu Ono has led the Ginza restaurant since 2023. His younger son Takashi Ono runs a separate Sukiyabashi Jiro in Roppongi that holds two Michelin stars.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia: Jiro Ono, Sukiyabashi Jiro: Jiro’s History, Wikipedia: Sukiyabashi Jiro, AP News: Japan’s sushi legend Jiro Ono turns 100, The New York Times: A Sushi Legend Captured in a New Documentary.