YUKA IOROI
Yuka Ioroi co-founded Cassava San Francisco, an independent, full-service hospitality company, with her husband and business partner, Executive Chef Kristoffer Toliao, in 2012.
Over fourteen years and three locations, she has directed the company's operations, finance, beverage programs, and business strategy through expansion, industry recognition, closure, bankruptcy, and rebuilding.
Today, she leads Cassava's evolution beyond the traditional restaurant model, encompassing corporate catering, executive hospitality, private dining, and chef-driven experiences.
Born in Shizuoka, Japan, and based in California since 1995, she also writes about restaurants, labor, authorship, and the distance between what institutions recognize and what people actually build.
五百蔵 由香（いおろい ゆか）
カサヴァ（Cassava San Francisco）共同創業者兼CEO
2012年、夫でありビジネスパートナーでもあるエグゼクティブシェフ、クリストファー・トリアオとともにカサヴァを創業。創業以来14年間、サンフランシスコ市内の3つの拠点で事業を展開。成長と業界での評価を経験する一方、閉店や破産という転機も経ながら、運営、財務、飲料プログラム、経営戦略を一貫して統括してきました。現在は、企業向けケータリング、エグゼクティブ・ホスピタリティ、プライベートダイニング、シェフ主導の特別な食体験など、従来のレストランの枠を超えたカサヴァの事業展開を牽引しています。
静岡県出身。1995年よりカリフォルニアを拠点とし、レストラン経営、労働、オーサーシップ（経営における主体性と表現）、そして「制度が評価するもの」と「現場で実際に築き上げられるもの」の間にある距離についても執筆しています。
QUALIFIED is a memoir in essays about authorship, perception, and the systems that determine who is recognized clearly. Through the story of building Cassava in San Francisco with her husband Kris Toliao, chef and co-owner, Yuka Ioroi examines the gap between excellence and legibility, and the consequences of being understood through simplified narratives rather than the work itself.
Across fourteen years, three locations, industry recognition, and eventual closure, the essays document a recurring pattern: the restaurant was consistently interpreted through Yuka's Japanese identity while Kris's authorship of the food remained consistently obscured. What emerged was not a single misunderstanding, but a structural pattern repeated across reviews, headlines, industry language, and public perception.
Blending restaurant history, cultural analysis, operational detail, and personal narrative, QUALIFIED traces how identity becomes shorthand within the American restaurant industry, how institutions reward legibility over precision, and what it means to continue building within those constraints. At its center is a question that extends beyond restaurants: who is permitted to be seen as fully authoritative in public life, and under what conditions.
PRESS
San Francisco Business Times — "Cassava co-owner Yuka Ioroi is breaking barriers between front and back of house staff" — 2023
Resy — "Cassava's Yuka Ioroi on Leading, Reopening, and Building a Better Restaurant Industry" — 2021
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