Roy Yamaguchi first took up cooking as a teenager to get dates with girls in Home Economics class. Now with 35 restaurants throughout North America, a hit TV series seen in more than sixty countries, and three best-selling cookbooks, Roy has taken that humble ambition to new heights. Born and raised in Tokyo, Roy trained at the American Culinary Institute in New York. He worked his way into some of the best restaurants in California, but longed to fuse his French training with his Asian roots. The solution was relocating to Hawaii where he created a new kind of Hawaiian fusion cuisine, and has never looked back. He opened his first "Roy's? in Honolulu in 1988 and is still expanding his massive restaurant empire today.