Masaki Saito earned two Michelin stars in New York, and again in Toronto.Supplied
The tears begin well before he steps on stage. They come before anything else – before the applause, the cameras, and well before he lifts that bright red, two-starred plaque at the Michelin Guide Toronto ceremony. Before it all, Chef Masaki Saito is backstage, collecting himself.
“I saw him in a more intimate moment,” says Jamal Burger, co-director of the new documentary Still Single, revisiting the moment that drew him to the Edomae-style sushi master in 2022 – not as a filmmaker, but as a photographer capturing the ceremony. “You saw a man who genuinely cared about what he’d been able to accomplish in front of his peers.”
That same beat carries Saito to the podium, where – still blinking through the remnants of those same tears – he slurs his confession into the roomful of Toronto’s culinary aristocracy: “I’m still single. I don’t know why.”
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It earns laughter, sure, but it also feels like someone telling the truth without meaning to. And as Burger remembers, the name of the film was “under our noses the entire time.”
Burger, a Toronto-born photographer, had already carved out a visual language – gritty and experimental – by the time Rhombus Media noticed a Prism-nominated music video he’d made for the Canadian band BadBadNotGood. The veteran Canadian production house had been circling Saito as a subject.
Toronto-born photographer Jamal Burger co-directed Still Single, which made him consider his own pursuit, he says.Supplied
Burger’s encounter with this vulnerable version of Saito largely led to a lot of the themes behind his first feature-length documentary, which documents the figure behind the Michelin veneer.
What he found there was a contradiction too rich to ignore: all that mastery and melancholy, paired with sudden bursts of eccentric, almost boyish quirkiness.
“You realize he was single in so many ways,” Burger adds. “He was the only chef in Canada with two stars; he’s lost people along the way, and he’s far from his family. He was chasing something so big, and there wasn’t really a blueprint for it.”
Two Michelin stars are brutally hard to win, almost impossible to keep. Saito earned them in New York, then again at his Toronto counter, Sushi Masaki Saito, holding both from the guide’s 2022 debut through 2024, before a 2025 downgrade.
As a witness to that pursuit, Still Single mirrors Saito and this endeavour in all his directions – good, bad, erratic, charming, difficult and strange. Filmed over the course of a year and a half between late 2022 and early 2024, the documentary traces Saito’s life in both Toronto and his rural Japanese hometown of Muroran, Hokkaido. It’s an examination of a once-regular Edomae sushi master who became the sole two-Michelin-star chef in Canada.
The documentary opens with Saito on a beach in Japan, kneeling toward the sea, shaping sushi. From there, Burger, alongside Tokyo- and London-based co-director Jukan Tateisi, pulls viewers into the restless loop of his life: the soft rituals of fish aging to the brink, the frenetic hum of service, the claustrophobia of his kitchen’s design, and the nights that unravel into drink and jokes.
Tokyo- and London-based Jukan Tateisi co-directs with Burger and helps to unlock the deeper story.Supplied
It unfolds under the lowlight vibe of a six-seat sushi bar counter in Toronto where the omakase runs over $700 a head. It’s the kind of if-you-have-to-ask price that earned Saito passing name-checks in Rick Ross and Drake’s Gold Roses.
The longer the camera stays on him, the more the film edges toward a larger question: What is genius when the person behind it is a combination of brilliance and complication?
“He even lost his best friend during the filmmaking process,” Burger recalls. “There’s a distance between him and his family… he’s from a town of less than 50,000 people in rural Hokkaido. It’s a big dream he’s been after, and he doesn’t really have a proof of concept before him. He’s been trekking uncharted territory.”
For Burger, trust had to come first. “Our first extended period of time was in Japan, no camera presence, we had to become friends,” Burger says, remembering the eight to twelve months before a year and a half of filming, when proximity had to be earned. “We had to get the co-sign from his parents. To be like, ‘Okay, we’re comfortable with these two, they seem genuine.’”
Still Single unfolds under the lowlight vibe of a six-seat sushi bar counter in Toronto.Supplied
Burger entered the project, not as a culinary expert but as a Toronto-born photographer whose work through Kickback – a non-profit that uses sneakers to provide youth from underserved communities with transformative experiences in sports, art and education – as well as through street portraits and instinct-driven storytelling, had always depended on reading people before reading their craft.
That meant Burger had to adjust to a different rhythm while documenting Saito: the clipped pace of service, the silence of a kitchen built for precision and the guardedness of someone who speaks most freely in Japanese. Much of what passed between them moved through Tateisi, bridging language and the things Saito rarely voiced.
“There were nuances to the culture that I had to be a student in,” Burger says.
Burger didn’t understand fish-aging or knife work, but he recognized the loneliness and responsibility Saito carried.
There’s a moment when Saito shrugs off his own mythology: “I don’t think I’m much better than anyone. I’m lucky to be in the position I’m in.”
Burger relates. His own path – from Kickback to a Prism nomination to being discovered by Rhombus Media – still feels improbable. Both men treat their success as luck, though the film reveals the sacrifice beneath it.
It’s the trust between the subject and the directors that unlocked the deeper story here: how ambition isolates, hardens and shapes the person chasing it.
Still Single opens at Toronto's TIFF Lightbox on Dec. 6.Supplied
The film, in fact, often returns to cost. Saito rejects the idea of a “Japanese dream,” noting Japan doesn’t romanticize striving the way North America does. One former employee even quits and returns to Japan, pulled by homesickness, hoping to open a restaurant – only to find the climb even steeper there.
Inevitably, the film’s questions turn back on Burger himself through his reflections after filming wrapped. Following Saito made him consider his own pursuit – what it asks of him, and how far imagination can stretch when you grow up with little evidence of possibility.
“I come from a single-mother home,” Burger says. “Sometimes you don’t even know what’s possible for you.” In some ways, watching Saito chase perfection became, for Burger, a study in the cost of chasing anything at all.
Still Single opens at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto Dec. 6.
Special to The Globe and Mail