EGN NEWS DESK
If you’re in search of the second when American omakase eating places started to threaten steakhouses as the popular venues for younger males of means to commune round prohibitively costly protein, you could possibly do worse than the weekend of Jan. 8, 2021.
That’s when Joe Rogan walked into Sushi Bar ATX, in Austin, Texas.
“Best sushi I’ve ever had in my life,” he wrote in an Instagram put up, which has 182,000 likes.
The comic and podcaster had lately moved to city from Los Angeles. So had Phillip Frankland Lee, the chef of Sushi Bar on the time, which he had opened as a pop-up, partly to remain afloat whereas his California eating places have been shuttered by pandemic lockdowns.
“I hope you determine to maneuver right here full time!” added Mr. Rogan, who has 19 million Instagram followers.
By the following morning, Mr. Lee mentioned, the ready record for Sushi Bar’s 10 seats was 1000’s of names lengthy. Soon after, Mr. Lee and Margarita Kallas-Lee, his spouse and enterprise associate, formally relocated.
Austin has since turn out to be an epicenter of omakase’s inconceivable rise into mainstream restaurant tradition — making it, in Mr. Lee’s phrases, “the most popular idea in America proper now.”
Traditional Japanese omakase sushi is a tranquil eating ritual, notable for its restraint, during which an itamae, or sushi grasp, serves a sequence of bite-size dishes to a small group of diners seated an arm’s size away. In distinction, Mr. Lee’s signature strikes embrace blowtorching bone marrow to soften over eel and portray hamachi with corn pudding sauce. Sushi Bar ATX, now a everlasting restaurant underneath the route of Adept Hospitality, additionally presents luxe add-ons like Wagyu beef topped with caviar (a $20 chew), which together with shaved black truffles and foie gras are actually de rigueur.
These menus and their devotees represent a brand new number of sushi expertise — a social phenomenon as a lot as a culinary one — which The New York Times critic Pete Wells has christened “bromakase.”
In some ways, the bromakase has taken features of the high-end American steakhouse — extreme tabs, conspicuous consumption of premium meats and a masculine, expense-account ambiance — and given them a contemporary, worldly gloss. The parts are smaller, however the costs make it potential to spend much more cash much more shortly.
Like steakhouses, they’re a recognizable, replicable expertise now widespread nationwide. Just as red-leather cubicles and darkish oak paneling set off the Pavlovian expectation of a frigid martini and a glistening rib-eye, intimate counters from Omaha to Austin to Chicago to Denver promise a multicourse procession of jewel-like fish flown in a single day from Japan.
“I see loads of gents with different gents carrying fits,” mentioned Maya Takano, a Houston meals blogger, who considers omakases her favourite kind of restaurant. They are additionally the sort she will get requested to suggest most. “People are like: ‘Hey, I’m prepared to spend this a lot cash, however I wish to ensure I’m going to the appropriate place.’”
Not everyone seems to be a fan of the brand new omakase increase, although.
Bobbi Kim, whose Instagram deal with is the Uni Hunter, discovered to understand Japanese meals whereas rising up in Hawaii and omakase as an grownup in New York City. To her, a brand new technology of eating places are omakases in identify solely.
“This would possibly sound very harsh, however there’s been a bastardization of the expertise,” Ms. Kim mentioned. “My pals and I name them fauxmakase.”
As lately as 5 years in the past, conventional sushi omakases have been discovered primarily in New York and on the West Coast within the United States.
But in a 2020 assessment, Mr. Wells recognized the 2013 opening of Sushi Nakazawa, in New York City, as a turning level in American omakase. The restaurant’s chef, Daisuke Nakazawa, is a former apprentice to the Japanese sushi grasp Jiro Ono, the star of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a touchstone for each American omakase cooks and followers.
While Nakazawa loved a interval the place “its identify turned a metonym for excellence within the artwork of uncooked fish,” Mr. Wells wrote, its reputation with non-connoisseurs opened the door to a wave of omakase eating places “impressed much less by Japanese customs than by trendy New York stagecraft.”
Mr. Lee belongs to a technology of sushi cooks who’ve embraced omakase whereas shrugging off a few of its norms. Their eating places typically function cocktail lounges, hip-hop soundtracks and colourful sauces, all of which have been unthinkable not too way back.
Saine Wong, the chef at Toshokan in Austin, is even identified to tug out his guitar to guide singalongs after meals, which might embrace “nigiri” constructed from potato pavé and braised brief rib.
These new-school omakase eating places have two massive issues in widespread with a lot of their forebears: excessive costs and restricted seating. In reality, three of the 5 costliest Michelin-starred eating places within the United States are omakases, together with the costliest, Masa, in New York City, the place dinner for one on the counter is $950, not together with tax or drinks.
Most omakases usually are not that costly, however a cynic might nonetheless moderately describe them as locations you may’t afford and doubtless can’t get into even if you happen to might.
This excessive exclusivity is a major purpose so many high-income diners are turning away from steakhouses and towards omakases for special-occasion dinners, mentioned David Rodolitz, chief government of the corporate that owns Ito, an omakase with places in New York City and Las Vegas.
“I feel it’s a little bit of a flex, from folks’s social-currency standpoint,” Mr. Rodolitz mentioned. “It’s cool to be in a spot the place different folks can’t get in. And sushi pictures very properly, in comparison with a big, darkish piece of meat.”
In a March episode of “Free Food Podcast,” hosted by the New York City restaurant critic Ryan Sutton, Adam Coghlan, a London-based editor, mentioned omakase eating places the place dinner for 2 simply exceeds $1,000 “are aimed squarely on the finance trade and the tremendous rich” and don’t contribute to “meals tradition in any significant sense.”
Mr. Rodolitz mentioned he opened Ito in TriBeCa in 2022 as a result of he loves sushi, but additionally as a result of omakase is an attractive enterprise proposition. Ito is roughly the scale of a typical steakhouse’s barroom, with a small fraction of a steakhouse’s workers.
“Generally, you want extra sq. ft to do extra income,” Mr. Rodolitz defined. “We might pay a couple of extra factors in our meals prices, however we get a wild quantity of proportion factors again in labor and occupancy.”
Ito is a hybrid of conventional and new-school American omakase. The menu intersperses refined nigiri with small plates of uncooked fish, like Japanese halibut with apple vinegar gelée, that evoke Italian crudo; savory programs conclude with a slice of blowtorched Wagyu beef, naturally, lined in shaved black truffle.
On a temperate night time in February, Mr. Ito was behind the counter, joking with clients that the menu was so costly — $295 per particular person — as a result of the fish “flies top notch” from Japan.
The music — loud sufficient to listen to, quiet sufficient to speak over — swerved from Bell Biv DeVoe to Mobb Deep. The restaurant’s 16 seats have been occupied by diners of their 20s, 30s and 40s, most of them males. One mentioned he ate on the restaurant often, often with “my boys,” although he was with “the spouse” on this night time. After the person ordered post-meal extras — an uni and caviar handroll for himself, osetra-topped toro nigiri for his spouse — the couple did a shot with Mr. Ito.
Mr. Rodolitz mentioned the variety of Ito places he can open is proscribed by the relative shortage of cooks as succesful as his companions, Masa Ito and Kevin Kim, however the group is inquisitive about “scalable ideas” like its Bar Ito property that may be expanded “with out sacrificing the omakase expertise.”
When the second location of Sushi Nakazawa opened in Washington, D.C. in 2018, in what was then the Trump International Hotel, it helped seed the notion that you could possibly drag-and-drop an omakase restaurant into a number of places with out diminishing the model.
From their Texas base, Mr. Lee and Ms. Kallas-Lee have finished simply that. They parted methods with the buyers at Sushi Bar ATX in 2022, however now oversee 9 omakase eating places known as Sushi by Scratch, with places in Miami, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles.
“I actually needed to attempt to do one thing massive with this delicacies,” Mr. Lee mentioned. “And you may’t try this with one 10-seat restaurant in a single metropolis.”
Critics of omakase chain-ification say that it may be a cash-grab pushed by buyers, and that it has a homogenizing impact encapsulated by a January headline in D Magazine: Here’s Your Guide to Downtown Dallas’ New Near-Identical Omakase Spots.
The topics of the story have been outposts of Sushi by Scratch and Sushi Bar, whose present homeowners, Adept Hospitality, have opened places in Miami, Chicago and Dallas, with one other one set to open in Nashville this summer time.
Jonathan Husby, an Adept co-founder, mentioned there’s loads of room within the market for conventional omakase and eating places like Sushi Bar, the place “you don’t need to be a die-hard fish lover to benefit from the menu.”
“We’ve by no means been non-public fairness,” mentioned Mr. Husby, whose firm’s web site handle is adeptprivateequity.com. “We’re a conventional hospitality group.”
The omakase increase in Austin has not let up. Craft Omakase, which opened in December, represents one thing of a backlash towards the bromakase-drift of the native sushi scene.
Charlie Wang, an proprietor, mentioned Craft was impressed by a brief stint he spent working at Sushi Bar. That expertise is why Craft doesn’t provide additional dishes for additional cost, one thing he mentioned “simply feels a bit bit cheesy.”
He additionally described Craft’s meals, which blends largely unadorned nigiri with cross-cultural dishes like an aguachile made with leche de tigre, as an antidote to the upcharge gadgets which have turn out to be bromakase staples.
“When it involves Japanese delicacies, restraint is what you wish to obtain,” he mentioned. “It’s not laborious to place truffle and caviar and foie gras on every part.”
David Utterback, a Nebraska chef who considers a youthful pilgrimage to Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo as a life-altering inspiration, is skeptical that American omakases are sustaining requirements as they unfold. “Because of this increase of omakase counters during the last 5 – 6 years, anybody who’s ever labored at a sushi counter now seems like they will simply cost triple,” he mentioned.
Mr. Utterback’s first restaurant, Yoshitomo, included an omakase counter when it opened in Omaha in 2017. And final 12 months, he opened a stand-alone six-seat omakase known as Ota, which a current profile of him in The Washington Post known as “one among America’s greatest sushi eating places.”
The self-taught chef, who’s the son of a Japanese mom and American father, is a traditionalist in spirit and an innovator in apply, as with the Wagyu he tops with sea urchin butter and calls “prairie tuna.”
While Ota’s $265 dinner isn’t low cost, Mr. Utterback mentioned he’s uncomfortable with what number of new American omakases appear to exist primarily to draw ultrawealthy diners.
This month, shareholders in Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha-based conglomerate lead by Warren Buffett, streamed to city for an annual assembly. Many have been stunned, Mr. Utterback mentioned, to find that Ota was closed, as he busied himself getting ready one other new restaurant opening.
“I opened this counter for my metropolis. I didn’t open the counter for out-of-town visitors,” he defined. “But now they’re coming right here.”
