How to Eat Like a Chef at T-Mobile Park? Try One of Everything — Especially the Teriyaki!

J. Kenji López-Alt is wearing a “I <3 Teriyaki” T-shirt underneath a Seattle Mariners jersey with his last name on the back. As the acclaimed chef and best-selling cookbook author takes the pitcher’s mound at T-Mobile Park, two thoughts cross his mind.

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Eating at T-Mobile Park these days is as much Cracker Jack as it is Dungeness crab pizza. In this Q&A, Seattle chef and award-winning food writer J. Kenji López-Alt maps a game plan to bring local flavor to every inning, including with his very own Seattle-style teriyaki pop-up.

“My primary goal is not to embarrass myself in front of my kids,” he says, jokingly. “And then my secondary goal is being completely okay with embarrassing myself in front of my kids. I figured there was a 50/50 chance that I’d get it somewhere near the plate.”

Turns out, he had nothing to worry about. The ball sailed right over, landing into the waiting glove of Mariners third base coach Kristopher Negrón.

Cheers from the crowd naturally followed. Of course, there was also plenty of excitement for the heat López-Alt brought to the park that night as a culinary pro. The main point of the chef’s MLB debut: his Teriyaki Night pop-up.

As is often the case with López-Alt’s endeavors, the event was a hit, with tickets selling out well ahead of time and the evening ending with many a satisfied baseball — and teriyaki — fan.

To anyone familiar with his work, his stats and bona fides in the food world are packed. His popular books include The Food Lab, one of two to win a prestigious James Beard Foundation award. He’s a regular in both print and video for the New York Times, and has some 809,000 Instagram followers and over 134,000 followers on TikTok. And, of course, he is the creator and host of Kenji’s Cooking Show on YouTube, where he has nearly 1.7 million YouTube subscribers — and where he recently posted a video about his favorite foods at T-Mobile Park, serving as a walk-up to his Teriyaki Night event.

Here he reveals his secret sauce (somewhat literally) for the perfect teriyaki plate, the real importance behind throwing the first pitch and eating anything and everything at T-Mobile Park.

Your sold-out Teriyaki Night pop-up at T-Mobile Park was huge success. How does teriyaki fit into the world of Seattle baseball?

I grew up in New York, and in New York, pizza is the big democratizer, the one that everybody eats and the one that everybody enjoys and the one that you can get. It’s like every neighborhood has their local pizza spot and they’re all a little different, but they’re all New York pizzas. So when I moved to Seattle five years ago, I found that teriyaki is the Seattle equivalent. It’s a dish that was created and is still mostly cooked by immigrants. It’s inexpensive and filling. Every neighborhood has its own spot. And it is really unique to Seattle: Chicken teriyaki was invented here by a Japanese American immigrant in 1976, Toshi Kasahara, and it’s since gone on to sort of take over the entire area. There are over a hundred teriyaki shops in and around the Seattle area.