“In my mind, what makes omakase dining the number one experience at a sushi restaurant is that it is the ultimate open kitchen,” chef Masaki Saito tells POV. The master chef is renowned for his ability to create superb dining in the “omakase” style, in which customers trust his curatorial power to serve the best series of dishes.
Saito’s artistry as a sushi chef has no equal in Canada. As of July 2025, his omakase restaurant Sushi Masaki Saito is the only restaurant in Toronto with two Michelin stars. In Canada, only one other restaurant, Quebec City’s Tanière3 boasts the same distinction.
The appropriately titled documentary Still Single, directed by Jamal Burger and Jukan Tateisi, and produced by Fraser Ash and Kevin Krikst of Rhombus Media and Julian Nieva of Common Good, shows the high-energy chef in action. Saito’s omakase-style service whips up a bespoke spread mere inches from diners who enjoy the menu in an intimate setting priced at $680 a head. (That’s before booze, too.) Still Single, which has its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, takes audiences inside Sushi Masaki Saito to see the hard work entailed in earning Saito’s rare distinction.
Still Single furthers the chef’s idea of the open kitchen. The film begins with a poetically enigmatic image of Saito preparing sushi on a beach in Japan. He takes the open concept of omakase-style dining to an extreme, sharing both his art and life for all to see. This surreal sight provides a fitting snapshot of the master chef. Saito harnesses all the natural elements, embraces his Japanese roots, and invites the viewer to enjoy the performance of putting rice and sushi to plate.
“He is a unique person, a very edgy person compared to typical sushi chefs in Japan,” Tateisi tells POV. “When you watch the film, you feel that he is quite special not only for his talent but also for his very strong character. Sometimes, Japanese society doesn’t allow young talented people to become more than polite. He’s excellent as a comedian also, which is good, but sometimes it’s too much in Japan. When you’re young, an artist or chef, you need to obey the rules to get access to opportunities.”
Saito’s individuality is evident in the way he relocated from Japan to New York where he helped launch Sushi Ginza Onodera, earning his first two Michelin stars by age thirty before recognizing an opportunity in Toronto’s culinary scene. “Canada has more power,” Saito says. “Canada has more space; Canada has potential.” The film shows how he carries Japan in his heart, but his renegade spirit thrives in North America as opposed to the collectivist society of his homeland. It seems like a good recipe: when Sushi Masaki Saito opened in Yorkville in 2019, it was named the number one new restaurant in Canada.
“When I was first talking to Niv [Fichman] at Rhombus and they shared a bit of Saito’s story, I was just fascinated by how young he was,” adds Burger. “And how much he was able to accomplish so early on and how he’s been able to shift the culture of Toronto through his restaurant and the quality it demands.”
The success of Sushi Masaki Saito is notable in a city where five of the thirteen Michelin-starred restaurants are Japanese. Saito says it’s hard to pinpoint the essence of Japanese cuisine that delivers upon Michelin star expectations. Instead, he looks to his own philosophy that Still Single illuminates.
He says that mastering Japanese cuisine entails harnessing the four seasons and the five senses. “It’s a key point,” says Saito, speaking occasionally through his server, personal assistant, and sous-chef Miyuki Nagasawa. “It’s easy to show more to the customer; it’s easy to understand [the story] they want to tell through Japanese cuisine.”
Like the best of food docs, Still Single delights the senses as it observes Saito and his team in the kitchen. Vignettes of the chef in action mirror the experience of sitting at his bar as he puts on a show for dinner. Close-up shots afford a sense of touch as he palms tuna and rice—specialty short grain Yukitsubaki rice from Niigata prefecture, doused in his special blend of vinegars—while carefully shaping sushi before his customers’ eyes. As his fine blade slices the fish, all of which are handline caught from Japan, one can practically feel the soft buttery sensation of the salmon on one’s tongue. For smell, Saito shares his secret for allowing his tuna to push the limits of its best before date. One can practically smell the fish fermenting to perfection.
“I think the food is a result of the human,” Burger says when asked about his approach to shooting the food. “Saito was the character that we were focusing on, and sushi is his craft, so it starts and ends with him. Our favourite documentaries are the ones that feel like you really get to know the human and you get to jump into their life on a level that the everyday person may not. And see just what goes into being a chef. There’s so much behind the scenes that we don’t see in daily life. There’s more than enough incredible food content on the internet.”
“We thought we could challenge Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is a gigantic documentary about sushi all over the world,” adds Tateisi. “That film has the sense of presenting Jiro more like a Zen master and has a very clear, clean visual with the classical masterpieces [on the score]. We could try something against that.”
Still Single indeed challenges Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In place of Jiro’s Zen-like portraiture, Burger and Tateisi reflect Saito’s sense of play with an artfully chaotic quick tempo and cinematography that reflects the collisions between cultures, tradition, and modernity by mixing warm 16mm intimate handheld vérité with some digital black and white shots. As Saito hurries in the kitchen before the showtime, the drums of the jazzy Birdman-esque score by Alex Sowinski get the viewer appropriately pumped up for their cinematic and culinary experience.
Saito’s work hard, play hard lifestyle, moreover, makes him closer kin to Anthony Bourdain than to Jiro Ono. Still Single gives as much screen time to Saito’s full-throttle karaoke performances—Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” seems to be his favourite—as it does his delicate platings. His after-hours habits are as high-end as the meals he prepares. His business partner William Cheng notes that he once dropped $25,000 on sake in a single night out with Saito. Other times, he returns to Japan and has booze-fuelled nights out with his best friend of twenty years, Yasu. And others, he’s taking the kitchen team to the horse races and dropping $1000 bets. He’s as high a roller as any regular customer at Sushi Masaki Saito. But Still Single observes how these seemingly off-hour extravagances are key to Saito’s secret recipe.
Tateisi admits that Saito’s commitment to pursuing his goals is something to which he relates. “Saito says there is no ‘Japanese dream,’ especially for young people who have vision or creativity,” he says.
Saito raises this idea during a return trip to Japan in the film. It’s a jarring moment of introspection that comes when he briefly introduces his mother and gives the film a sense of his upbringing in Hokkaido. He conveys a feeling of being stifled by Japan’s conformist nature, while moving overseas to pursue the American dream proves more attuned to his brainwave.
“In North America, opportunities are very horizontal in the sense where anyone can jump up and become something. If you get noticed, you can go from zero to a hundred very quickly,” says Burger. “But in Japan, it’s still very processional and there are steps and markers that you have to reach to be considered for certain opportunities and successes, versus in America, you can become a celebrity overnight.”
Interestingly, when asked in a separate interview about the inspiration behind his MSSM (Masaki Saito Sushi Method) restaurants where his protégés take the lead, Saito makes a vertical hand gesture that evokes a totem pole. “In Japan, the restaurant philosophy is teacher-student-student-student,” he says while stacking his hands. He likens his MSSM sushi restaurants to a relay where he passes the baton.
“For the new generation of young chefs, they can create themselves with my DNA,” Saito says. “They don’t need to follow me a hundred percent. But I need to give them an opportunity.”
The sensei-student relationship brings an extraordinary storyline in Still Single that accentuates the complexity of dreams both Japanese and American. The film introduces Saito’s sous chef Tsuyoshi Yoshinaga, a skilled itamae a few years his Oyakata’s senior. Burger clearly hits a nerve with Tsuyoshi in an early interview in Still Single when he asks why an older hand is sous cheffing for a younger head chef. Tsuyoshi, somewhat miffed, tries to answer the question, but his deferential politeness forces him to stop and rethink his answer.
Tsuyoshi dedicates himself to the kitchen and assumes he’s getting his reward as Saito plans to open a new restaurant. But shortly after news comes that he won’t be heading the new kitchen solo, as Saito explains the philosophy of the MSSM locations, their relationship takes a twist. Tsuyoshi returns to Japan to pursue his own restaurant. But his fate hardly brings Michelin-level rewards. When the film checks in on him, he is plating sushi for the conveyer belt of an all-you-can-eat IKEA-style eatery while working at a Value Village-type store on the side.
“We didn’t think that Tsuyoshi would become such a strong character in the film, honestly,” explains Tateisi. “He was just a sous chef for Saito. When I first met Tsuyoshi in Toronto, honestly, I didn’t think he was Japanese—he has a very different technique to typical Japanese sushi chefs. But when he went back to Japan, I was so surprised that he evolved so much in a very short timeline.”
“These are two different characters who are representative of pathways that different chefs go down,” adds Burger. “More often than not, there’s a chef for whom things don’t end up going according to plan. They’re faced with a setback, a financial deficit, or a promise that doesn’t come through. But also, you see which lifestyle is favoured in the restaurant world in terms of Tsuyoshi being a family man who is collaborative with his wife and very mindful of his children and their future, while Saito’s all in on work. That’s where you run into tension or friction with work when you’re trying to find equilibrium between your family and your craft.” Audiences see this too with Miyuki, who is only a server when the film begins, but adds sous chef to her résumé when Tsuyoshi leaves. She says the personal toll is high, but she loves her job.
Saito admits that it was sad seeing Tsuyoshi leave for Japan, but he feels happy that his friend did what he felt he had to do to advance.
He learned from me, and he went back to Japan. Even now I support him, and he always has questions,” says Saito. “He came back in August and September [2024] and ate at my restaurant too, so we still have a good relationship [even though] we don’t work together. It’s the same: my DNA as leader and he’s the graduate.”
Burger adds that Tsuyoshi’s storyline ultimately strengthens Saito’s arc with the play on “still single” in terms of Michelin star status and his personal life.
Still Single doesn’t come down on Saito in a needlessly harsh manner. Saito constantly surrounds himself with people who share his passion. He precedes every service by sharing a meal with his colleagues. But, notably, he refrains from eating because he says hunger fuels him: He must share his customers’ appetite in order to ensure each dish delivers the quality he anticipates.
The chef tells POV that the Saito you see in the film is really a character, “like a Mickey Mouse” that he plays during the “on” hours that encompass both work and play. “This is ‘on time’ Saito,” he says. “But ‘off time’ Saito is zero energy, sleeping on the bed, watching YouTube.”
Still Single therefore serves a pragmatic study of workaholism that asks viewers to weigh the costs of pursuing a dream. If you love your job as much as Saito does and share his commitment, there’s no real distinction between work and play.
“You realize he’s separate from his family, he loses his best friend, and his sous chef goes back and he’s on his own mentally, emotionally, and physically in terms of the issues he had with drinking,” says Burger. “It’s a singular journey. Fortunately, or unfortunately, however you look at it, to bring something into the world that has never existed, chances are you’re going to be single for a majority of the time. He still had no partner or significant other, his family still wasn’t visiting Toronto and Tsuyoshi’s doing his thing. The film is a portrait that attempts to articulate why he’s still single.”
Tateisi relates the still single idea back to the contrast between Saito and Tsuyoshi. “Which do you want to become? If you’re a young Japanese person who wants to challenge life, you can take your guts and your dream and escape from Japan. Or, you can just be in Japan,” says Tateisi. “To me, it is one of the greatest countries in terms of quality of life, food, cleanliness, but you don’t get such a big dream, so which one of them do you want to become?”
“On the flip side of that, some of the resistance that Saito ran into in North America were results of the qualities and characteristics that make Japan such a great place to be because people there are highly respectful,” says Burger. “They’re genuine, hardworking, and disciplined. I feel like in North America, we’re always looking for shortcuts. This film taught me that I need to work harder. He’s the only two-Michelin star chef in Toronto for [good] reason. I think whatever profession you aspire to thrive in, this is a version of what commitment looks like. To be great, this is what it takes, and this is what you may lose, and this is what you gain. It’s your choice at the end of the day.”
Some audiences might see this life as a lonely one. Others might identify with Saito living the dream: how lucky are those of us who get to do their dream daily?
Saito, however, remains committed to his takeover of the Toronto food scene. He knows there’s no short cut for that third Michelin star “Only one word: passion-energy. Passion-energy,” he says, stressing the hyphenation to convey how his love for sushi fuels him.
“Focus, focus, focus. Taste. Focus, focus. Cooking. Focus, focus,” says Saito. “To spend your life cooking and making food, look for that passion-energy.” With no restaurant in Canada currently holding three-star status, he’ll inevitably fly solo en route to the top. One’s only a lonely number if you want it to be.
