Kyōten — Restaurant in West Chicago Township

Last evening at Kyōten was enchanted. The bar seats eight people. And there is only a single seating per night at 6:30. The base price on a Friday/weekend is $490 + tax, and my bill was $557 with one delicious sake.

Chef Otto Phan is Vietnamese-American, and he’s obsessed with Japanese ingredients and flavors. He doesn’t do anything that steps afoul of Japanese traditions, but he’s also not constrained by them. Phan is a wunderkind with close relationships built with mentors and purveyors in Tokyo, who he visits twice annually and texts daily. Like an investor on the phone with a trader on the exchange floor, the fish traders on the floor of Tokyo’s bustling fish markets text Phan daily updates about what looks extraordinary, and so Phan’s menu is seasonal, based on the market’s best daily offering, and features only wild-caught fish. This, and the fact that Phan personally prepares every bite dispelled my concern that the cost of dinner was gratuitous. After dining and understanding the premium Phan pays for his ingredients, the cost makes sense.

Everything tasted delicious. There was one course I couldn’t eat, monkfish liver, but I did have the slightest nibble and it was buttery, mild, and delicious, and I loved its ginger teriyaki bath. As a wildlife disease epidemiology researcher, I’m essentially a parasitologist. And once I interact with a research specimen in the field, my ability to eat a clean version of that thing raw in the future is done. It’s why raw proteins are nearly impossible for me in general. I put my rules and prejudices aside and ate course after course of Phan’s transportingly delicious fish painted with sauces, glistening, sliced, pinched, sometimes packed over delicious rice, and often concealing a poultice of wasabi, citrus zest, horseradish, ginger, or other complementary aromatics taking each bite to the next level. Some courses I enjoyed with my eyes closed to focus on the flavors, not caring that I may have looked weird. The two tempura courses, lobster with its roe, and beltfish, were my favorites.

Another protein that I generally don’t enjoy raw is beef. Phan’s wagyu nigiri looks extremely rare, but it spends four hours in the sous vide and its fats and juices melt in your mouth. My enjoyment of this wagyu was in contrast to wagyu I was served last week at a different restaurant’s tasting menu where a nearly fist-sized rose-shaped wad of too much wagyu to serve in one bite made me channel my inner Khaleesi as I imagined myself as Daenerys Targaryen trying to choke down a whole horse heart. Phan’s wagyu course, like all of his courses, I truly enjoyed.

Phan is an artist, and watching his passion and giftedness was thrilling. His hands squeezing the rice or shaping the fish and the gleam in his eyes made me think of the Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi, which embraces imperfection, transience, and connection to nature. Here is this beautiful young chef in his absolute prime, with extraordinary fish that he instructs you to eat the moment he places it on your plate not waiting for the diner next to you to receive theirs, and we’re tasting the fruits of our oceans, which are in a race against time both literally with a short window on their peak freshness, and also figuratively as our oceans are warming.

I fell in...

I went a couple years ago so things might have changed but I still remember it as my worst sushi experience. I don’t think the sushi chef and owner here is a properly trained sushi chef and yet he charges way more than any three star Michelin restaurant in Tokyo.

His apron is dirty, and he does not seem to understand that sushi chefs usually wear a white apron to show how immaculate they are. His looks like a butcher’s apron with stains everywhere. He also is too cheap to hire a waiter so the last time I was there, the assistant in the back was doing everything including prepping, serving and dunking his bare hands into oil which had food in it to be served. I did not even see him wash his hands and that made it very unsanitary. I guess some people in the Midwest would think this is proper omakase and are willing to pay for it, but as an omakase lover who have been to the best Japanese restaurants around the world, I would say this was my least favorite and the place where I felt most ripped off paying more than $1,300 for two people for a very mediocre sushi prepared in an unsanitary way, and with only one glass of wine each…

The ambience only had bare walls and a random picture of ham hung in the middle of the room and a portable stereo playing music…

The chef wasn’t particularly all that friendly or accommodating either. During the whole time, he was just criticizing other sushi chefs in town with another guest who was from the restaurant industry. I just did not see the typical entertainment and professionalism that comes with this type of price tag.

Some of this might have changed since when I last went, but the pretentious character of the chef along with his unprofessionalism would make me think nothing substantially improved enough for me to give it a second chance.

Its prices show that it’s striving to be a high end omakase, but it’s nowhere near it it in terms of ambience, food, and service wouldn’t be fooled and would just pass. I only went because somehow it had a high rating on google, but I’m just now sure how he has that kind of rating. Just writing this in hopes of saving...

The key to understanding a meal at Kyōten is best described by Chef Phan himself: this is not a sushi restaurant, but rather an ingredient centered restaurant - and it certainly shows.

You can tell there was great effort put into the preparation of those ingredients, and the overall composition of the meal, which found a novel way of fitting into a multi-course meal format. Each round new, exciting, and tasty. That said, at this price point, that is the minimum requirement to be met.

So much of this meal hinged on the experience that minor distractions like bit-too-loud music and obvious issues with the interior finishes start making a difference. These are the details that make it FEEL like the place you want to experience new tastes in. The spotlight was taken off the ingredients even more by the lack of overall story for the food itself which you had to dig for to really get.

Watching Chef Phan I could tell he loved and respected the art of preparing fish. His eyes lit up at his own splendid ingredients and energy completely changed when he stood behind his cutting boards. I hope he can find a way to hone that spark, distraction free, and make the meal more deserving of the price tag it...