Company history

In July 1967 Shogaki Yasuhiko, a physics graduate of Tokyo University of Science who had given up on research, opened a small restaurant called Saizeriya above a greengrocer in Ichikawa, Chiba. It served an undistinguished mix of Japanese and Western dishes, and its owner had neither reputation nor culinary training. The following year a brawl between gangsters broke out inside; a kerosene heater thrown in the scuffle burned the place to the ground. Shogaki reopened in May 1968 on the same street — this time as an Italian restaurant, the fire having forced the question of what the business actually was.

His reason for choosing Italian food was quantitative, in the manner of the discipline he had left. Eighty to ninety per cent of how good a dish tastes, he reckoned, is decided by the ingredients; technique contributes perhaps five to ten. A cuisine that depends on materials rather than on a chef’s hands is structurally suited to being run as a chain. And in the Japan of the 1970s, with the yen above ¥300 to the dollar, the cheese, olive oil and pasta such a menu needed were expensive to import — which, read the other way round, was a barrier keeping potential rivals out of the field he was entering.

None of it worked at first. Five years in, the restaurant took about ¥30,000 a day and the Shogaki brothers drew almost nothing. Splitting the problem into cause and effect, Shogaki concluded that two of the variables — the location and the cooking — were fixed, and that the only one left was price. Around 1975, as a last bet, he cut every item on the menu by 60–70%: spaghetti went out at ¥200–300 when ¥400–600 was normal, and the dish that became the chain’s signature, Milano-style doria, at $1 (¥304). The restaurant filled overnight. With crowds came the rest of the model — a narrow menu of dishes people actually wanted, no waste in purchasing, and a deliberate refusal of the industry’s first commandment: rather than pay for a good site, take a bad one cheaply and spend the saved rent on food. The company was incorporated in May 1973 with ¥1m in capital.

A third restaurant opened in Ichikawa in December 1977, and from there Saizeriya expanded as a chain — deliberately clustered in the Tokyo metropolitan area rather than spread thin. It learned the formats one at a time: a shopping-centre unit at Funabashi in 1981, a station-building unit back in its home town in 1987, a roadside unit in Kashiwa in 1989; order-entry terminals replaced handwritten tickets from 1987, and by 1988 twenty standardized restaurants were running. Specializing in Italian food turned out to matter well beyond the menu. A conventional family restaurant buys a little of everything; Saizeriya bought cheese, tomatoes and olive oil in volume, and as the yen strengthened through the 1980s the cost of importing them fell.

Then the chain went national — Aichi in 1991, Hokkaido and Toyama in 1992, the fiftieth restaurant in Sapporo in June 1992, the hundredth in Fujisawa in July 1994, Kobe in 1995 — and it did so on an explicit piece of arithmetic. Shogaki approved a site only if it would return more than 20% on the capital invested. Borrow three times equity, put the whole sum into new restaurants, hold an ordinary profit margin of 20%, and revenue compounds at 130–150% a year. That calculation is what made the cheap, awkward locations no one else wanted the rational choice rather than a compromise. The company took its present name in September 1992.

One episode fixed its marketing policy for good. A television feature in 1994 produced queues outside every restaurant the next day; the kitchens could not cope, service collapsed, and customers left. Saizeriya thereafter held advertising to about 0.3% of sales and put the difference into ingredients. The model showed in the numbers — by December 2001 the operating margin had reached 16.3%, which the 日経金融新聞 attributed to metropolitan clustering and to the company’s own food plants. Saizeriya registered over-the-counter in April 1998, listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in July 1999, and moved to the First Section in August 2000.

In June 2003 Saizeriya set up a subsidiary in Shanghai and entered mainland China. It lost money at first and turned a profit only after reworking operations on the ground, but the entry was followed by a dense run of others — Guangzhou in 2007, Taiwan, Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2008 — concentrated on the high-density Chinese-speaking cities rather than scattered across markets. What travelled was not the brand so much as the cost design: fix location and taste, treat price as the variable, and hold the supply of food in your own hands.

That last part was being built at the same time. Saizeriya kept pushing upstream — a manufacturing subsidiary in Australia in 2000, its own farms in Fukushima, food plants in Kanagawa (2001), Hyogo (2003) and Chiba (2013), a rice mill, and from 2012 a food factory in Guangzhou to supply China. Vegetables were developed from the seed so that, for instance, no labour was wasted cutting out cores. Farm, factory and restaurant were joined end to end, all of it in service of the same allocation set in 1975: spend on the ingredient, save everywhere else. The 1,000th restaurant opened in Osaka in June 2011, and group customer numbers passed 200 million a year in 2015.

The pandemic hit a business built on filling seats, and Saizeriya fell to a net loss in the year to August 2020. Demand came back — revenue reached a record ¥183.2bn in the year to August 2023, carried by both a national network of some 1,050 restaurants at home and a still-growing count in Asia. Profit, though, has been a different story: a weakening yen has raised the cost of imported food enough to force guidance down.

This is the founding advantage running in reverse. The expensive imports of the 1970s kept rivals out of the market Shogaki was building; the same currency movement now pushes his cost base up from the inside, while inflating the yen value of profits earned abroad. Overseas restaurants can also charge what Japan will not bear — the doria sells for around ¥450 in Singapore against roughly ¥300 at home. President Matsutani Shuji has held domestic prices anyway, on the grounds that Japanese wages are not rising, even as profits multiplied in 2024. Growth has accordingly been shifted outward: overseas restaurants passed 500 in November 2023, Vietnam, Australia, Guangdong, Wuhan and Malaysia were all entered during 2025, and the annual report published in November 2025 set out a vision of 10,000 restaurants with most of the increment abroad. Saizeriya moved to the TSE Prime Market in April 2022.