Chad Clift grew up in Lake Forest Park in Seattle where his father, born in Japan, taught him how to cook in the Japanese tradition. Clift of course learned how to make popular Japanese dishes like sushi, but he also learned how to make many other dishes that aren’t as popular today. Clift grew up eating and preparing meals with the freshest ingredients that his father made sure to always provide for his son. Clift’s mother ran her own business, and when he was old enough, she started showing him how to properly manage a business in the way that she learned during her many years of business management experience. From an early age, Clift had the tools and the desire to start his own restaurant some day. Nearly 20 years ago, he did, in his hometown.
Futoji Aji means “bold taste” in Japanese. Chad Clift named it that to remind him that he can never be complacent with the food dishes and tastes that his kitchen produces. After high school in Seattle, Clift moved to Portland to attend the Oregon Culinary Institute, for which he had earned a scholarship. After three years there, he worked in a San Francisco Thai restaurant as an apprentice. With little money and even less time on his hands while he worked as an apprentice, Clift didn’t have a place to live for the first few weeks in San Francisco. He slept in the kitchen most nights until he was discovered by the restaurant owner, who offered to help him find a room. Clift was able to find a place to sleep, but he mostly lived in the kitchen.
It was this passion for cooking that kept him working the long hours as an apprentice in San Francisco and what eventually led him to start his own Japanese restaurant in his hometown of Seattle a few years after he got his first job in the Thai restaurant. By the time he returned, much to his parents’ delight, to Seattle, Chad Clift had the experience and the skill to be successful running his own restaurant. He wanted to create new ways of expressing the traditional tastes and textures of Japanese cuisine for his community to enjoy. Clift has always kept a rotating menu along with what he calls his “staple” menu, full of the traditional dishes that he knows people are expecting from a Japanese restaurant such as his.
Chad Clift keeps bringing in new talent to his kitchen to help him produce his fresh and bold new menu items and test them for taste and originality. He treats every day as a new challenge to test his food preparation skills and creativity in the kitchen.
Chad Clift 