Super Bowl

Japanese rice-bowl joints are supposed to be fast, cheap and nutritious. If they were just fast and cheap, they'd be McDonald's. If they were just fast and nutritious, they'd be Juice Stops. And if they were just cheap and nutritious, they'd be U-Pick berry farms. You get the picture: Remove one element from the fast-cheap-nutritious formula, and a Japanese rice-bowl joint just doesn't work.

Larry Leith recognized that. And when he finally decided that the healthy fast-food alternative he wanted to bring to the masses was an American variation on the Japanese rice-bowl joint, he knew he'd have to follow the formula if he wanted to do things right. "It was March 13, 1996," Leith says. "I remember the exact date." That's because it was the same day he had to pay his monthly mortgage with a credit card. "Have you ever had one of those days where you were really scared? That was one of those days."

Before he made the decision to open Tokyo Joe's, though, Leith had given this first venture into the restaurant world a lot of thought. An avid road and mountain biker and former pro skier -- after college, he lived in Vail and competed on the pro tour for several years -- Leith was always looking for food that would fuel his athletic activities. "The bottom line is, most of the fast food out there makes your body sick," he says. "I'd been personally trying to find better food to eat, and I started thinking about how I could come up with a way to offer it in a contemporary sort of atmosphere that would make people of all backgrounds feel comfortable, but would also be affordable, so people could eat it a lot. And that's when I thought I'd give it a try."

Leith started out small, opening the first Tokyo Joe's at Dry Creek and Yosemite in Englewood in 1996. He waited a year before opening a second spot on East Evans Avenue, and since then he's added six more, all in the Denver area. The latest Tokyo Joe's, which opened this past spring on Grant Street just off 13th Avenue in Capitol Hill, is by far the coolest-looking. But all eight outposts have a similar, vaguely Asian feel -- sort of feng shui meets skateboard park, casual but stylish enough that the average geriatric diner feels hip rather than alienated.

Tokyo Joe's has more than good looks going for it, though. This eatery -- I ate several times at the Grant Street and East Evans Joe's -- has mastered the three crucial Japanese rice-bowl-joint elements. It's fast: The longest I had to wait between ordering and putting the first fork to food was seven minutes -- and that order involved six appetizers and five entrées, including a specialty bowl, which the menu helpfully warns takes a few extra minutes. It's cheap: Most regular-sized bowls run between $4 and $6 and hold enough food to satisfy most appetites; the priciest item, a big version of the salmon bowl, costs $8.45 but contains food to spare. And it's undeniably nutritious: Everything at Tokyo Joe's is grilled or steamed (no frying), the chicken is skinless, no MSG is used, and the sauces are based on simple, healthy Asian concoctions. While the bowls come with white rice, an extra forty cents nabs the healthier brown, and sixty cents buys you udon, the wheat-based Japanese noodle.

There's another bonus to Tokyo Joe's food: Everything tastes good. The recipes are all Leith's, and the result is no Taco Bell-type interpretation of Asian cooking. In fact, the salmon bowl would work in some of Denver's more frou-frou Japanese restaurants. The hefty fillet had been slicked with Tokyo Joe's teriyaki sauce, a thin, not-too-sugary mixture that soaked into the fish a bit and helped the grill turn the fish's edges into sweet little crispy crackers; inside, the flesh remained moist and slightly underdone. Tokyo Joe's way with meats was further displayed in a steak bowl that featured melt-in-your-mouth slivers of sirloin, as well as a chicken bowl filled with soft, tender bird. Even tofu got special treatment, with the big chunks of soybean cake sporting a light, golden crust.

The bowls come with a choice of sauces -- the aforementioned teriyaki, curry, oyako or Spicy-aki, Joe's trademarked spicy take on teriyaki. The oyako, the lightest of the options, tasted faintly oniony; it went well with the oyako bowl, a variation of the traditional Japanese dish that pairs chicken and eggs (oya means parent in Japanese, and ko means child). At Tokyo Joe's, though, the egg can be paired with chicken, steak, a combination of the two or tofu, and grill-caramelized onions tie the pairing together.

But Tokyo Joe's isn't all about bowls. It also serves up well-crafted sushi rolls -- including a California combo with a surprise shmear of wasabe and Joe's Roll, a delectable grouping of avocado, shrimp and cream cheese -- as well as gyoza stuffed with scallion-scented pork. We also munched our way through lightly salted edamame and a crunchy, freshly made sunomono salad of cucumbers and carrots soaked in sugar-enhanced vinegar. The only disappointment was the miso soup, topped with too much raw cabbage that detracted from the soft texture of the tofu in the creamy broth.