Credit: Rey Lopez

The Rise of New American Omakase

12 Minute read

24 Jun 2025

Kiki Aranita

Journalist

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From French technique to blaring rap, chefs like Ryan Ratino are reshaping omakase into something louder, looser, and unmistakably their own.

A wood-lacquered jewel box, spring-loaded with elaborate, hand-painted chopsticks, has become a mid-course signature at Ryan Ratino’s restaurants, which span Washington D.C. and Florida. I can’t help but squeal each time a server presents the box to diners clustered around the counters at Jônt in D.C., Ômo by Jônt in Orlando, or MAASS in Fort Lauderdale. I always select what to me is the prettiest pair—invariably the pink ones.

At Ômo by Jônt, I dipped a doll-sized wooden spoon into a chawanmushi encircled with flowers, rendered from corn, soy milk, and kombu. I used those same pink chopsticks to pluck soba strands from a broth scented with yuzu kosho, tomato, and shiso. I watched, mesmerized, as servers shaved truffles in unison over lightly sweet, sticky Nanatsuboshi rice cooked with cultured butter in a donabe. Then came wagyu, slicked with shio kombu sauce, and slices of eye-wateringly expensive Crown melon served over ice. Dessert: kakigori made tableside with caramel and kinako, from a Hatsuyaki ice shaver. The menu—presented only at the end—was printed with a gyotaku fish image, painted in ink and pressed to paper.

And yet: “We’re not a Japanese restaurant,” clarified Ratino when I spoke to him recently by phone.

Ratino clarified that Ômo is a contemporary French restaurant, influenced by Japanese ingredients and technique. “Ômo is named for ‘omotenashi,’ the art of hospitality,” he said. At his restaurants, that influence shows up everywhere: warm hand towels, chawanmushi bowls nestled inside blossoms, broth courses that reset the palate mid-meal, and the drama of servers placing dishes in front of diners in unison. The experience closely resembles omakase.

A Fine Line Between Influence and Imitation

Still, Ratino’s restaurants are not exactly omakase—and that distinction is important. The word omakase traditionally refers to a tasting format, where the chef chooses each course, often with intimate interaction at a counter. Today, that term is being stretched to encompass a growing range of dining experiences across the U.S.

I’ve seen it applied to high-end sushi counters hidden inside casual restaurants, and even to a hoagie room at Philly’s Pizzeria Beddia, which was once dubbed the “hoagie omakase.” (That experience has since been renamed a “pizza party,” but it originally cost $495 to book, exclusive of gratuity.)

Tasting menus like these allow chefs a wide range of creative freedom. As a diner, I want to be led through a flow of courses, trusting that the best things a chef can source or imagine will come my way. If we’re using a Japanese term to describe this experience, then so be it.

America’s Hidden Omakase Boom

America is in the midst of an omakase moment. The Financial Times recently mapped Miami’s surge in high-end omakase counters—many of them hidden inside larger restaurant concepts. The trend isn’t limited to Florida. Grand Central in New York City now has both the 18-seat Joji, a partnership between Daniel Boulud and Masa chef George Ruan, and Robby Cook’s Coral, tucked inside Point Seven.

Once upon a time, restaurateurs hid speakeasy cocktail bars inside their restaurants. Now they’re hiding speakeasy omakases.

In Philadelphia, you walk through the chaotic, dive bar-esque Royal Izakaya to reach the serene, far more expensive Royal Sushi—if you can get a reservation. In Chicago, there’s the Omakase Room at Sushi-San. The Sushi by Scratch Restaurants group serves $200-per-head omakase experiences from inside NADC Burger joints across the country.

Ratino’s Jônt and MAASS adhere to this format. Jônt’s 16-seat counter sits above the more casual, 70-seat Bresca, and MAASS’s 12-seat counter is tucked into a corner of the larger restaurant. It’s a structure that adds surprise and intimacy—two elements that omakase thrives on.

A Looser, Louder Remix

It’s still rare to see American influences upon omakase at these speakeasies. Most of them strive to recreate the intimacy and reverence of a Japanese experience—often without diverging from the aesthetic or cultural framework.

Ratino’s approach stands apart. At his restaurants, the experience borrows elements of omakase—precision, progression, formality—but remixes them into something looser, louder, and more reflective of his own tastes. His menus are soundtracked by blaring rap. Guests move through the restaurant as part of the meal. There’s the lacquered chopstick box, the broth courses that reset your palate, the floral chawanmushi, the Crown melon finale. Each element feels theatrical and deliberate.

Dining at Ômo or Jônt is an ambulatory, multi-sensory experience. It’s also personal. Ratino told me, “People may just see us as chefs, but [restaurants] are reflections of the music you like, the places you like to travel to. I want to be my own guest.”

Why Now? Japan’s Global Reach

Before 2019, Ratino described his style as “traditional French. Roasting animals on the bone, making consommé.” He explained, “It was sauce work-driven, with more ingredients on the plate. Let me show you five different ways I can cook lamb or a carrot. Now I’ll serve them in two variations, rather than layer ten ingredients on top of them.”

That shift followed his first trip to Japan—invited by a business partner from Nagoya—and since then, he’s returned ten times. Some visits were sponsored by local governments and ministries of agriculture. Others were tied to pop-up dinners for IHG hotels. He’d piggyback extra days onto the trips to travel, visit his brokers at the fish market, and “eat like goons.”

“In Japan, I’ll do the same market tours over and over,” he told me. “It’s like reading a book a second time. You reinterpret chapters differently. That’s what happens every time we go to Japan. I get new ideas, and add them to my Rolodex of thoughts.”

Japan’s government continues to encourage the use of its ingredients through outreach programs, bringing chefs from around the world to explore its regional products. I attended one of these myself: a week-long wagyu seminar at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. None of the chefs were expected to cook traditional Japanese food, and none of them did.

That openness—chefs being encouraged to adapt, rather than replicate—has contributed to this broader evolution of omakase in the U.S. While the majority of high-end sushi counters are still led by men, it’s worth noting that I encountered two rising-star female omakase chefs while reporting this piece: Jamie Liu, chef de cuisine at Ogawa in Miami, and Nikki Zheng, founder of Sushi Akira in Manhattan.

The form is still sacred. But who gets to reinterpret it—and how—is shifting.

What Makes It American

At Ratino’s restaurants, roughly 50 to 60 percent of the ingredients are sourced from Japan—rice from smallholder farmers, seaweed, fish flown in weekly, foraged berries, and those pampered Crown melons from Shizuoka Prefecture. At home, he told me, he uses the same ingredients, the same plates and utensils. “They’re amazing and they train your palate,” he said. “And I don’t serve you this amazing stuff at the restaurant and then go home and eat pizza rolls.”

Still, his menus don’t recreate Japanese omakase—they reshape it. The structure is familiar, but the storytelling is entirely his own. Instead of restraint, there’s flair. Instead of replication, there’s reinterpretation. It’s not omakase in the traditional sense. It’s a version filtered through travel, technique, and personal taste—a format reimagined by a chef who wants to be his own guest.

Omakase may be a Japanese word, but what it signals here is something else entirely: trust in the hands of a chef with a different story to tell. I don’t need the meal to follow tradition. I just need to believe it’s leading somewhere—and that the person guiding it knows exactly who they are, and what they want to show me.

That’s not omakase as it was. That’s New American omakase.

The Chef

Ohio-born Ryan Ratino is an award-winning chef whose cooking style has been influenced by molecular gastronomy, traditional French techniques, and Japanese culinary philosophy. He owns and runs two restaurants in the same building in Washington DC: the neo-Parisian bistro Bresca, which holds a Michelin star, and the Japanese-style, counter tasting restaurant Jont, which boasts two. Building on the success of these ventures, he has opened restaurants in Florida and will expand his empire further with openings in Los Angeles.

24 Jun 2025