MUNCHIES and Kirin Ichiban are excited to announce the launch of Omakase Dinners, a series of intimate, invite-only events with our favorite sushi chefs. In partnership with New York Sushi Ko, we’ll be hosting a different chef from around the country each week, serving four nine-person dinners for a select group of friends.
This week, our dinners have featured chefs Kaz Edwards and Jeff Miller of James Beard Award-winning restaurant Uchi in Austin. We caught up with Edwards and Miller to find out what inspired the menu for their gorgeous sushi feast.
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MUNCHIES: Hi, Kaz and Jeff. Tell us a little about your personal stories. How did you become chefs, particularly in Japanese cuisine? Kaz: I grew up in Beaumont, right on the border of Louisiana and Texas, [where there’s] kind of a unique cuisine, so I was always really into cooking. I went to college, graduated, got into culinary school, and went to a French-training culinary school. Tyson Cole, our executive chef, he was kind of coming up at the time. Being from a small town, and having kind of a large extended family, I was looking for something like that. I found this place that was very family-oriented, that pretty much had every ethnicity working within it, pulling from all different regions, and I’ve been a student ever since. I’ve been there for 12 years now. [They] say you don’t want to leave a restaurant until you’ve learned everything. I’ve moved up here and there, but I still don’t feel like I’ve learned everything. It’s been a great experience so far.
Jeff: I think it’s important to note that Uchi basically created a new position for Kaz.
Kaz: It’s kind of a silly title, they call it Concept Chef, but I’m the chef over Uchi Concepts.
Jeff: I loved sushi more than anything. I moved to Florida to go to college, and I had no business getting a job in a sushi bar, but I wanted to learn. The first place I applied was called Dragon Fly Sushi and Sake Company, and it’s a wonderful restaurant. I walked in there, coincidentally, the same day that the chef was expecting what I think was a friend of the owner, and he thought that I was him. There was no interview, he just handed me paperwork and I had a job as a sushi chef. I didn’t understand—I thought, Well, the job market here must just be really good right now. I spent five years there and graduated and decided to stick with it.
Kaz: How long was it until you found out that that had happened?
Jeff: The chef that hired me told me that story, like, two years after I’d been hired. Until that point, he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going to have to fire me.
How does Uchi represent Japanese food in Texas, or Japanese cuisine overall? Kaz: [The restaurant] was opened by Tyson Cole, the head sushi chef—that was his bread and butter. He wanted to take that experience of guests sitting in front of a sushi chef and being catered to, in a sense. Small bites, unexpected things, right? Something you would never get when you’re sitting ordering off the menu from a server. I wouldn’t call Uchi super traditional in any sense. We do some traditional things—sashimi, etc.—but we do a lot of things to help people ride that path of sitting at the bar, eating sushi all night long, and really enjoying it.
The great thing about this day and age is that we can really source from all over the world. Texas has great produce, a lot of ranches, great beef, and we’re able to source those things locally. They have a very underutilized resource in the Gulf, which is pretty amazing. Some of the best fish I’ve ever had came out of the Gulf because we got it [fresh] that day.
What about your take on omakase? Kaz: It means, trust us. When you come into our resturant, that’s what we want you to do—we want you to trust us. [Our staff] goes through a three- to six-month training process to become a server and that’s because we expect them to have the knowledge of a chef, to be able to talk like a chef, and to be able to cater your meal like a sushi chef would. Ninety percent of [our guests] just let the server take care of them. They’ll usually give them a couple of restrictions—dietary, money, whatever—and the server will just provide a meal for them.
Jeff: I do want to talk about omakase, because … it’s half the reason I love my work. If somebody comes in and just orders off the menu, I’m not doing anything for them. I get kind of pissed off if they don’t let me. I’ll just start. Like, they’ll order something off the menu, and they don’t think it’s good, and I’ll pretend to put in the order, and then say, “While you’re waiting, try this!” and then they’ll be like, “Oh man, that’s really good … Is it cool if we keep going in this direction?” And then, 15 courses later, $375 later. No, that’s a joke, I don’t run up the bill. We have some very reasonably priced options.
How do you feel like your balancing traditional Japanese culinary traditions with the new? Kaz: It’s not so much a balancing act as it is kind of seeing what we can do. We’re not trying to force anything, we’re not trying to do stuff just to do it. You know, there was the whole molecular gastronomy [movement], and these trends that come along that, but that’s what they are. They’re trends. They fade, they come and go. So, it’s not so much balancing the two, it’s just finding a path. We don’t limit ourselves to just doing strictly Japanese things. We use a lot of different ingredients from around the world, which I think makes it a little more accessible too.
For this menu in particular, what was the creative process? KAZ: We bounced back and forth a lot with this, but what we really wanted was taking the experience you would get in our restaurant and bringing it here. We’re not going to try to do what John does here [at New York Sushi Ko], because he does it very, very well.
Any specific tips you give consumers around how to eat sushi? I think that sushi in Texas evolved a certain way. I think what we do, it’s not so much traditional—soy sauce, wasabi, [those are] super common. Every piece that we have, every dish that we serve, is seasoned a certain way so those things aren’t even necessary. I think the reality of it is that we still need to cater to those people because you know, if they want that, they want that. But for me, those things aren’t necessary when the food is done right. But again, it should be fun. It shouldn’t be so stagnant, where every time we put a piece down we’re telling them, “you should eat like this.”
What’s a common misconception that consumers have about sushi in the US? Kaz: I think in the US in general, the common misconception is “Where are you getting this fish? How are you doing this? This must be frozen.” Again, in this day and age, you can source fish from all over the world and have it at your back door the next day. We work with a lot of local fisherman, especially in Houston, so everything that we get is amazing quality.
Thanks, Kaz and Jeff.
Next week, starting Tuesday 11/16 and ending Friday 11/20, we’ll be featuring dinners with chef Tim Archuleta from critically acclaimed ICHI Sushi + NI Bar in San Francisco. Stay tuned.
