By Brett Anderson
Published May 21, 2024
If you’re looking for the moment when American omakase restaurants began to threaten steakhouses as the preferred venues for young men of means to commune around prohibitively expensive protein, you could 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 post, which has 182,000 likes.
The comedian and podcaster had recently moved to town from Los Angeles. So had Phillip Frankland Lee, the chef of Sushi Bar at the time, which he had opened as a pop-up, partly to stay afloat while his California restaurants were shuttered by pandemic lockdowns.
“I hope you decide to move here full time!” added Mr. Rogan, who has 19 million Instagram followers.
By the next morning, Mr. Lee said, the waiting list for Sushi Bar’s 10 seats was thousands of names long. Soon after, Mr. Lee and Margarita Kallas-Lee, his wife and business partner, officially relocated.
Austin has since become an epicenter of omakase’s improbable rise into mainstream restaurant culture — making it, in Mr. Lee’s words, “the hottest concept in America right now.”
New American sushi omakases are more theatrical than traditional Japanese omakases. Chefs often use blowtorches, as they do at Sushi Bar ATX in Austin, Texas.
Traditional Japanese omakase sushi is a tranquil dining ritual, notable for its restraint, in which an itamae, or sushi master, serves a series of bite-size dishes to a small group of diners seated an arm’s length away. In contrast, Mr. Lee’s signature moves include blowtorching bone marrow to melt over eel and painting hamachi with corn pudding sauce. Sushi Bar ATX, now a permanent restaurant under the direction of Adept Hospitality, also offers luxe add-ons like Wagyu beef topped with caviar (a $20 bite), which along with shaved black truffles and foie gras are now de rigueur.
These menus and their devotees constitute a new variety of sushi experience — a social phenomenon as much as a culinary one — which The New York Times critic Pete Wells has christened “bromakase.”
In many ways, the bromakase has taken aspects of the high-end American steakhouse — excessive tabs, conspicuous consumption of premium meats and a masculine, expense-account atmosphere — and given them a modern, worldly gloss. The portions are smaller, but the prices make it possible to spend even more money even more quickly.
Like steakhouses, they are a recognizable, replicable experience now common nationwide. Just as red-leather booths and dark oak paneling trigger 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 overnight from Japan.
“I see a lot of gentlemen with other gentlemen wearing suits,” said Maya Takano, a Houston food blogger, who considers omakases her favorite type of restaurant. They are also the type she gets asked to recommend most. “People are like: ‘Hey, I’m willing to spend this much money, but I want to be sure I go to the right place.’”
Not everyone is a fan of the new omakase boom, though.
Bobbi Kim, whose Instagram handle is the Uni Hunter, learned to appreciate Japanese food while growing up in Hawaii and omakase as an adult in New York City. To her, a new generation of restaurants are omakases in name only.
“This might sound very harsh, but there’s been a bastardization of the experience,” Ms. Kim said. “My friends and I call them fauxmakase.”
As recently as five years ago, traditional sushi omakases were found mainly in New York and on the West Coast in the United States.
But in a 2020 review, Mr. Wells identified the 2013 opening of Sushi Nakazawa, in New York City, as a turning point in American omakase. The restaurant’s chef, Daisuke Nakazawa, is a former apprentice to the Japanese sushi master Jiro Ono, the star of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a touchstone for both American omakase chefs and fans.
While Nakazawa enjoyed a period where “its name became a metonym for excellence in the art of raw fish,” Mr. Wells wrote, its popularity with non-connoisseurs opened the door to a wave of omakase restaurants “inspired less by Japanese customs than by modern New York stagecraft.”
Mr. Lee belongs to a generation of sushi chefs who have embraced omakase while shrugging off some of its norms. Their restaurants often feature cocktail lounges, hip-hop soundtracks and colorful sauces, all of which were unthinkable not too long ago.