Imagine An Instagram Photo That Serves A Tasting Menu
Is there a restaurant more of 2017 than Kato? Could such a thing exist? Because from the moment you find your way to the tiny place, hidden at the back of a mini-mall, it feels as if you have wandered into a living Instagram photo, where the walls are pale, the food is bright and the people in the background all look as if they have been accepted to UCLA Law. Jonathan Yao, the San Gabriel Valley-raised young chef, seems to have stumbled into Kato after short stages at Alma and Coi, but GQ still named it one of the best new restaurants of the year.
The restaurant has a mandatory tasting menu. You are never far from sesame seeds or fresh herbs. The occasional dish may be inflected with butter or cream, but you will probably never detect it. Some chefs would call this style of cooking "modern kaiseki," but Yao tends not to cleave to any sort of classical form. The restaurant is named for the Green Hornet sidekick played by Bruce Lee in the '60s TV series, although I was kind of hoping that it was named for the Los Angeles viola virtuoso Roland Kato.
Are there tiny blossoms on everything? Pretty much. Do Yao's sauces tend to lean a little too often toward flavored mayonnaise? Perhaps. Do his dishes veer between French and various Asian flavors in a way that seems more like '80s fusion at places like Chaya Brasserie than they do to the abstracted modernist cuisine at places like Manresa and Coi? Indeed, but in a way that seems very much of the time.