When 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 can do worse than the weekend of Jan. 8, 2021.
That’s when Joe Rogan walked into Sushi Bar ATX, in Austin, Texas.
“Finest sushi I’ve ever had in my life,” he wrote in an Instagram submit, 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, which he had opened as a pop-up, partly to remain afloat whereas his California eating places had been shuttered by pandemic lockdowns.
“I hope you resolve to maneuver right here full time!” added Mr. Rogan, who has 19 million Instagram followers.
By the following morning, Mr. Lee mentioned, the ready listing for Sushi Bar’s 10 seats was 1000’s of names lengthy. Quickly after, Mr. Lee and Margarita Kallas-Lee, his spouse and enterprise companion, formally relocated.
Austin has since turn into an epicenter of omakase’s unbelievable rise into mainstream restaurant tradition — making it, in Mr. Lee’s phrases, “the most well liked idea in America proper now.”
Conventional Japanese omakase sushi is a tranquil eating ritual, notable for its restraint, by 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 embody blowtorching bone marrow to soften over eel and portray hamachi with corn pudding sauce. Sushi Bar ATX, now a everlasting restaurant, additionally presents luxe add-ons like Wagyu beef topped with caviar (a $20 chunk), which together with shaved black truffles and foie gras at the moment are 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 Instances critic Pete Wells has christened “bromakase.”
In some ways, the bromakase has taken elements of the high-end American steakhouse — extreme tabs, conspicuous consumption of premium meats and a masculine, expense-account environment — 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 frequent nationwide. Simply 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 numerous gents with different gents sporting fits,” mentioned Maya Takano, a Houston meals blogger, who considers omakases her favourite sort of restaurant. They’re additionally the sort she will get requested to suggest most. “Individuals are like: ‘Hey, I’m prepared to spend this a lot cash, however I wish to make sure I am going to the appropriate place.’”
Not everyone seems to be a fan of the brand new omakase growth, although.
Bobbi Kim, whose Instagram deal with is the Uni Hunter, realized to understand Japanese meals whereas rising up in Hawaii and omakase as an grownup in New York Metropolis. To her, a brand new technology of eating places are omakases in title solely.
“This would possibly sound very harsh, however there’s been a bastardization of the expertise,” Ms. Kim mentioned. “My buddies and I name them fauxmakase.”
As lately as 5 years in the past, conventional sushi omakases had been discovered primarily in New York and on the West Coast in america.
However in a 2020 assessment, Mr. Wells recognized the 2013 opening of Sushi Nakazawa, in New York Metropolis, 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 Goals of Sushi,” a touchstone for each American omakase cooks and followers.
Whereas Nakazawa loved a interval the place “its title turned a metonym for excellence within the artwork of uncooked fish,” Mr. Wells wrote, its recognition with non-connoisseurs opened the door to a wave of omakase eating places “impressed much less by Japanese customs than by fashionable 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 had been unthinkable not too way back.
Saine Wong, the chef at Toshokan in Austin, is even identified to drag out his guitar to guide singalongs after meals, which may embody “nigiri” constructed from potato pavé and braised quick rib.
These new-school omakase eating places have two massive issues in frequent with a lot of their forebears: excessive costs and restricted seating. In truth, three of the 5 costliest Michelin-starred eating places in america are omakases, together with the costliest, Masa, in New York Metropolis, the place dinner for one on the counter is $950, not together with tax or drinks.
Most omakases are usually not that costly, however a cynic might nonetheless moderately describe them as locations you’ll be able to’t afford and doubtless can’t get into even in the event you might.
This excessive exclusivity is a major cause so many high-income diners are turning away from steakhouses and towards omakases for special-occasion dinners, mentioned David Rodolitz, chief govt of the corporate that owns Ito, an omakase with areas in New York Metropolis and Las Vegas.
“I feel it’s a little bit of a flex, from individuals’s social-currency standpoint,” Mr. Rodolitz mentioned. “It’s cool to be in a spot the place different individuals can’t get in. And sushi images very nicely, in comparison with a big, darkish piece of meat.”
In a March episode of his “Free Meals Podcast,” Ryan Sutton, a New York Metropolis restaurant critic, mentioned omakase eating places the place dinner for 2 simply exceeds $1,000 “are aimed squarely on the finance business 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 in addition 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 staff.
“Usually, you want extra sq. toes to do extra income,” Mr. Rodolitz defined. “We could pay just a few 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, coated in shaved black truffle.
On a temperate evening in February, Mr. Ito was behind the counter, joking with prospects 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 had been occupied by diners of their 20s, 30s and 40s, most of them males. One mentioned he ate on the restaurant commonly, often with “my boys,” although he was with “the spouse” on this evening. 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 areas 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 curious 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 Worldwide Lodge, it helped seed the notion that you can drag-and-drop an omakase restaurant into a number of areas with out diminishing the model.
From their Texas base, Mr. Lee and Ms. Kallas-Lee have accomplished simply that. They parted methods with the traders at Sushi Bar ATX in 2022, however now oversee 9 omakase eating places referred to as Sushi by Scratch, with areas in Miami, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles.
“I actually wished to attempt to do one thing massive with this delicacies,” Mr. Lee mentioned. “And you’ll’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 traders, and that it has a homogenizing impact encapsulated by a January headline in D Journal: Right here’s Your Information to Downtown Dallas’ New Close to-Equivalent Omakase Spots.
The topics of the story had been outposts of Sushi by Scratch and Sushi Bar, whose present homeowners, Adept Hospitality, have opened areas in Miami, Chicago and Dallas, with one other one set to open in Nashville this summer season.
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 should be a die-hard fish lover to benefit from the menu.”
“We’ve by no means been personal fairness,” mentioned Mr. Husby, whose firm’s web site handle is adeptprivateequity.com. “We’re a standard hospitality group.”
The omakase growth 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 have is why Craft doesn’t supply further dishes for further cost, one thing he mentioned “simply feels slightly bit cheesy.”
He additionally described Craft’s meals, which blends principally unadorned nigiri with cross-cultural dishes like an aguachile made with leche de tigre, as an antidote to the upcharge objects which have turn into bromakase staples.
“In the case of Japanese delicacies, restraint is what you wish to obtain,” he mentioned. “It’s not exhausting 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. “Due to this growth of omakase counters over the past 5 or 6 years, anybody who’s ever labored at a sushi counter now looks like they will simply cost triple,” he mentioned.
Mr. Utterbacks 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 referred to as Ota, which a current profile of him in The Washington Put up referred to as “certainly one of America’s finest 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 follow, as with the Wagyu he tops with sea urchin butter and calls “prairie tuna.”
Whereas 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 had been stunned, Mr. Utterback mentioned, to find that Ota was closed, as he busied himself making ready one other new restaurant opening.
“I opened this counter for my metropolis. I didn’t open the counter for out-of-town company,” he defined. “However now they’re coming right here.”
