--- title: How a Father's Secret Recipe Turned This College Dropout into a Multimillionaire description: Hiroe Tanaka founded the Kushikatsu Tanaka restaurant chain and became a multimillionaire after her finding her deceased father's secret recipe. authors: - name: Rob Wile url: https://money.com/author/rob-wile/ at_money_since: 2017 articles: 191 covers: - Lifestyle - Business - Career Advice - Economy and Politics - Education - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Personal Finance - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes - Technology social: - https://x.com/rjwile former_staff: true published: '2017-04-26T15:23:45.000Z' modified: '2024-05-08T04:28:01.000Z' section: Lifestyle tags: - Entrepreneurs - Food - Food & Drink - restaurants - rich - Wealth word_count: 225 canonical: https://money.com/kushikatsu-tanaka-restaurant-father-secret-recipe/ type: Article source: structured-blocks --- > **Disclosure:** We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. [Learn more](https://money.com/page/disclaimer/). ![Inside A Store Of Fast-Growing Izakaya Chain Kushikatsu Tanaka](https://img.money.com/2017/04/170426_kushikatsu-tanaka1.jpg) *An employee fries Kushikatsu at a Kushikatsu Tanaka restaurant in Tokyo, Japan.* There are endless ways to become rich, and the particulars for how people build wealth tend to be pretty boring. But the origins of how one Japanese woman became a multimillionaire entrepreneur is a tale that's both riveting and touching. As [*Bloomberg* reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-23/how-her-dying-dad-s-lost-recipe-made-hiroe-tanaka-a-millionaire), her path to wealth began after finding her deceased father's secret recipe for a fried meat snack. Hiroe Tanaka was 21 when her father passed away. For years beforehand, she told *Bloomberg*, he used his downtime from working as a real estate agent to perfect her favorite meal, called kushikatsu. It's considered soul food in the city of Osaka: deep-fried meat cutlet skewers with panko crust. After dropping out of college, Tanaka spent years trying to popularize kushikatsu, but couldn't get her own recipe to catch on. Then the global financial crisis hit, and the restaurant she was working for said it was going to close. She began to pack up her things. "That’s when she found it," *Bloomberg* reports. "It was in a box of memos and mementos from her dad. He’d left her the secret of his kushikatsu after all." Tanaka, 46, now owns a 4 percent stake, valued at $3 million, in the company she subsequently founded, Kushikatsu Tanaka, Bloomberg says. The company has 146 restaurants, and a U.S. branch [just opened in Hawaii](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-phase-opening-completed-with-14-restaurants-at-japanese-food-alley-in-hawaii-300433243.html). 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