by Charles Kirkland, Jr.
The world of Chef Masaki Saito, Canada’s first Michelin two-star chef, is revealed in the documentary Still Single, which explores his groundbreaking approach to Omakase dining and the intense lifestyle that drives his culinary genius.
Still Single is as unorthodox and magnetic as its subject, the two-Michelin-starred chef Masaki Saito. Known for elevating Toronto’s culinary scene to global heights with his ethereal omakase artistry, Saito is a master of performance, precision, and passion, a “high priest” of sushi, as the film subtly suggests. And yet, behind the pristine cuts of aged tuna and perfectly formed rice, a different story unfolds: one of loneliness, contradiction, and emotional vulnerability.
Directed by Jamal Burger and Jukan Tateisi in their Toronto International Film Festival debut, Still Single begins where most culinary documentaries end, with the accolades already achieved. In 2022, Saito became the first chef in Canada to receive two Michelin stars. At the podium, instead of basking in humility, he thanks Michelin, nods to Toronto, and bluntly declares: “I’m still single.” It’s a moment that becomes the film’s thesis, a seemingly offhand joke that reveals far more than it lets on.
What follows is a visually rich, emotionally layered portrait of a man whose public brilliance contrasts sharply with his private restlessness. From the outset, the film leans into Saito’s contradictions: an early image shows him preparing sushi on a beach in Japan, raw, elemental, surreal. It’s a poetic metaphor for his life: exposed, beautiful, fleeting. This is not a documentary that merely captures a chef at work. Instead, Burger and Tateisi open up the very concept of “omakase” not just a dining style, but a philosophy of openness and surrender, and apply it to Saito’s life itself.
With the camera as an active participant that probes, lingers, and occasionally confronts, the filmmakers challenge traditional documentary form. Scenes are carefully composed, often cinematic, and unafraid to frame both grandeur and discomfort. Whether Saito is obsessively aging fish, laughing with staff, or spiraling into a drunken confession, the lens remains unforgiving and fascinated.
Equally compelling are the figures orbiting Saito’s world. Sous chefs past and present navigate the volatile gravity of his mentorship. A bright-eyed 19-year-old nicknamed “Pastaman” seeks purpose under Saito’s watchful eye. New business partners and opportunists appear, drawn to his genius or at least the potential for proximity to it. Only Saito’s childhood friend from Japan seems immune to the mystique, offering something rare in the chef’s world: authenticity without agenda.
But the film does not sanitize. Saito’s exuberance, seen in his boundless creativity and contagious energy, often veers into excess. He drinks too much. He parties recklessly. He burns bridges, sometimes unknowingly. One particularly troubling incident, captured on camera, casts a shadow over his carefully curated persona. When confronted about the emotional aftermath, Saito claims to be “fine,” but his deflection is telling. The moment becomes a pivot in the narrative, exposing the vulnerability he refuses to name. His inability to sit with his emotions becomes the quiet answer to the question posed so cavalierly at the beginning: Why is he still single?
Still Single succeeds because it refuses to follow the formula. It doesn’t lionize Saito, nor does it vilify him. Instead, it captures the full contradiction of a man who embodies both control and chaos, brilliance and brokenness. It’s the story of a master of his craft who is still, in many ways, searching for connection, for peace, for something that all the Michelin stars in the world can’t seem to deliver.
Unflinching, unconventional, and visually arresting, Still Single is more than a portrait of a celebrity chef. It is a meditation on the price of genius and the loneliness that can live beneath even the brightest spotlight.
Grade: B-