The Unstoppable Chef Jesse Ito: Omakase, Legacy, and Sobriety

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk Bachmann: Hi, everyone. My name is Kirk Bachmann, and welcome back to The Ultimate Dish! Today, we are thrilled to welcome Chef Jesse Ito, co-owner of Royal Sushi & Izakaya in Philadelphia.

A first-generation Japanese Korean American, Jesse grew up in his family’s restaurant, Fuji, a Japanese restaurant in New Jersey with a cult following. Starting as an after-school dishwasher at age 14, he spent more than a decade working alongside his father, Masaharu Ito—a celebrated chef—training in everything from prep and pastry to tempura and fish butchery.

Chef Jesse began working at Fuji full-time in 2007 and soon took charge of the restaurant’s sushi bar. He began developing his own personal style and customer base and tinkering with the idea of opening his own restaurant.

That idea became a reality in 2016 when Jesse did, in fact, open the beloved Royal Sushi & Izakaya, bringing his dad in as a chef, partner, and tamagoyaki guru.

The restaurant is a lively, unfussy hub for Japanese comfort food and punchy cocktails. Tucked behind a curtain is Chef Jesse’s eight-seat sushi counter where he prepares the full 17-course omakase menu himself nightly.

Since opening Royal, Chef Jesse has been named Eater Young Gun and one of Zagat’s “30 Under 30.” He has also received seven award nominations from the James Beard Foundation, most recently as a finalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic 2024.

Jesse’s creativity doesn’t stop in the kitchen. He’s also a photographer, a ceramicist, and a budding yogi. And with his second restaurant in Rittenhouse on the horizon – we’ll talk about that later – his culinary journey shows no sign of slowing down.

In this episode, we’ll explore Jesse’s journey with his father’s influence, the vision behind his restaurants, and how he prioritizes mental health in the fast-paced hospitality world.

And I’m completely out of breath. Welcome to the show, Chef. Good to see you.

Jesse Ito: Thanks for having me. I need to carry you around with that intro. You could intro me everywhere.

Thoughts on Philly

Kirk Bachmann: Can I do that? I need a little practice, but it is absolutely impressive. Let’s just talk a little bit about where [we are.] I’m in Boulder, Colorado. You’re in Philly. We talked a little bit on sports before we got going. We’ll get back to that. Set the stage for us a little bit. You look like you’re in a high-rise. Are you in the city, outside of the city, close to the restaurant?

Jesse Ito: I live right in the heart of the city. I live in Rittenhouse, which is where all the skyscrapers are, [where all the] offices are. I am not too close to Royal Izakaya. I kind of removed myself a bit. You need a little distance.

Kirk Bachmann: You have to, right?

Jesse Ito: I’m a block away from the new restaurant, Dance Robot. I’ll be overseeing that construction and everything. Got to be close.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s great. That’s great. When we get to that, I’d really like to dive into how you can balance all of that given the fact that you spend so much time in the restaurant. I do have to give a big hello from Natalia, who was on our show, ironically, yesterday. Many of our listeners probably know her as the owner-operator of Midnight Pasta. She says hello. She’s super, super excited and frequents your establishment.

With that as a backdrop, we talked a lot with her yesterday about the super, super cool Philadelphia food scene. Her perspective, talking to you today, we know Marc Vetri, Pizza King and so on and so forth – so much more. What are your thoughts on the Philadelphia food scene today? Eli Kulp has been on the show. Great fan. Great friend. Any thoughts on Philly from you?

Jesse Ito: Yeah. Speaking of Marc, I’ve known Marc since I was a kid.

Kirk Bachmann: No way! No way!

Jesse Ito: Marc and his partner, Jeff Benjamin. They were going to my dad’s restaurant for decades.

Kirk Bachmann: No way. What a small world?! Wow.

Jesse Ito: Vetri had their staff party there in the nineties at my dad’s restaurant.

Kirk Bachmann: Isn’t that something?

Jesse Ito: Yeah, I’ve known him forever.

What to say about the Philly food scene? I would say Philly is like a world-class food city at this point. It has definitely garnered that reputation nationally. People respect it now. For a long time, we were just considered the underdogs, and other large cities would scoff. “What does Philly have to offer compared to us?” We’re so close to New York, D.C., and then there’s L.A., S.F., Miami.

But especially in the past five years, it’s just exploded on the national scene. So many James Beard wins. Philly has just dominated year after year. I have yet to win. I’m there for the ride. We have world-class chefs, some of the best chefs of many different cuisines. You mentioned Marc Vetri for Italian. There’s also just a great camaraderie among us all. It’s a small-big city. Everyone kind of knows each other. It also grounds you as a chef in a restaurant that you have to be real. This market does not support fluff. It has to offer value no matter what the price point. Whether it be expensive or cheap, it has to be value, otherwise the people here aren’t going to support it. I think that’s what makes Philadelphia special because you have to be exceptionally talented to succeed here.

Kirk Bachmann: I love that. Natalia said this similar idea that in Philadelphia you can actually get into a restaurant, even if it is just at the bar. You can actually get a reservation and enjoy yourself. It’s not just about a three- or six-month waitlist to get into a place, which could be gone by the time you get there. That’s great.

Congrats on all of that.

Funny story: I told this story yesterday, too. My wife and I were at a really cool place here in Boulder called Corrida, more of a Spanish vibe. Bryan Dayton owns that. He’s part of the Frasca group, or used to be, and then he broke out on his own. We’re sitting at the bar. My wife is on my right. She leans in, whispers in my ear and says, “Marc Vetri is sitting right next to you.”

I’m like, “How do you know that?”

He overheard it. “Yeah. I’m here. I’m visiting Bryan.” Yada, yada, yada. I haven’t gotten him on the show yet.

Jesse Ito: Marc loves going to Colorado. Also, Marc brought Bobby Stuckey.

Kirk Bachmann: To the restaurant. Yeah, yeah.

Jesse Ito: To the omakase. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but pre-covid he was there.

Tattoos from London

Kirk Bachmann: Bobby is a good friend. He’s spoken at graduation. His team hires a bunch of our students. It’s a high bar. I’ll tell him hi. He’ll get a kick out of that. That’s awesome. Yeah.

Before we dive in. I promised my wife I would ask this. Can you talk a little bit about the sleeves – the tattoos? Super, super impressive from social media and stuff. I’m just interested in your vision and how you go about and why you embrace the tattoos that you do.

Jesse Ito: Actually. Here, I’ll stand up for a second to show. I just got back from-

Kirk Bachmann: Beautiful.

Jesse Ito: My artist lives in London. I have a fresh one I just got on Saturday. I just got back from London on Monday.

Kirk Bachmann: Isn’t that something?!

Jesse Ito: I actually like more of a modern Japanese style because the black parts are actually very prominent, which is not so traditional. This is Japanese. My artist – his name is Rodrigo Soto. He’s lived in London for probably twenty-five years. He’s pretty famous for doing these Japanese peonies. I fly out to him to get these done.

I started actually last year Thanksgiving weekend. It’s been a year. So far, I have thirty-six hours of ink done, and I probably have twenty more to go.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s amazing. Is there a historical significance specifically to the radish, like my wall, juxtaposed against the black? Is that a very traditional sort of pattern?

Jesse Ito: This is Japanese style. It fills in everything. This is more contemporary because of how black it is. I think it’s worth noting, this is my first tattoo. My first tattoo, I flew out to London and started the sleeve and wanted to do two sleeves. For me, these pieces do not have a huge meaning. Flowers, but for me it’s about that I’ve really wanted this my whole life. My mom’s from Korea. My dad’s from Japan. Very traditional Asian parents. My mom cried for a whole year leading up to me getting this tattoo, begging me not to do it. Now when she sees me, she’s like, “It’s very beautiful. Please, please no more.” It was just part of me embracing who I am. There’s a stigma to being inked up like this.

Every Chef Should Start as a Dishwasher

Kirk Bachmann: I love it, and I appreciate your humility and your sharing.

Let’s talk about your family, growing up in the family business, and your mom and dad. I’d love to rewind your roots a little bit, specifically growing up in your father’s kitchen, Fuji. An article that we pulled up in “Eater,” you said, “I loved it. I always loved the skill set you had to build. It was a creative outlet.”

I’m going to take you further back. I grew up in a similar scenario with my father and mother’s bakery in downtown Chicago. There was some drama. We came out to Colorado. Then you’re cooking together in the same space. So good, bad, great, too.

Students walking by, laughing at me, by the way.

So let’s go all the way back to when you were fourteen, and you were starting to do dishes. I would love for you, in your words, to [tell us] what it was like working, not just at Fuji, but for your father. Here’s a person who already had a reputation and a good business and a way that he had to run things. Then you come into it. I’m living vicariously through my own memories. You had to fit in. Big question: did you know right away that this was what you were going to do in spite of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the relationship?

Jesse Ito: Yeah. You growing up, you’ll know exactly where I’m coming from. To preface, I do have to say that when I was fourteen, my parents divorced. They owned the business [together]. My mom ran the front; my dad was the chef. Me starting to work at fourteen was also a way for my dad to see me more often. That was also a catalyst to why I started at fourteen because he wanted to spend time with me since my parents divorced at that time.

I was fourteen years old. I didn’t really know what I was doing. But I started as a dishwasher, and you quickly learn that organizational skills and being quick is very important at being a dishwasher. You really appreciate the job. I feel like every chef should start as a dishwasher because you really start to understand how critical that role is. You start to develop fundamental organizational skills, system-building. I’m going to wash these plates first because they fit in the dish machine better. I’m going to stack it this way. I’m going to let it dry. You have to build systems in your mind to be successful at it instead of getting buried during the busy service.

Beyond that, it was really hard working with my dad because when you’re family, there’s less of a barrier to say how you’re feeling. I’m the son, and he’s my dad; I’m going to say how I feel. He’s going to say how he feels. That definitely caused some conflict, but it was also a nice way to spend time with the family. Even though my parents were divorced, they were both there.

I enjoyed it in the early years, definitely.

Lessons from Dad

Kirk Bachmann: I’m curious because, much more so than in my situation, your father was a celebrated successful restaurateur. I’m curious if there are, and there were, and there still are some traditional skills – even if you didn’t know it at the time – a certain way that he shaped how you cook and approach food today.

Jesse Ito: Absolutely. My dad is a classically trained chef from Japan. He left the house when he was sixteen. His dad passed away, and then he left home from Kyushu, Japan and started working around Tokyo and Osaka, and then came here in his early twenties to help open another very old Japanese restaurant called Sagami, which is still there. Then three years later, he opened Fuji. Japanese chefs are similar to French chefs; they’re kind of crazy, right?

Kirk Bachmann: Well, we all are. Yeah.

Jesse Ito: Especially at that time, there’s a lot of technique. He taught me all the fundamentals of Japanese cooking. Japanese cookery is very technical-based. How do you cut? Which knives do you use for which item? There’s a knife for every single thing. So he taught me all the fundamentals of how to cut things, how to store vegetables, how to break down fish, how to make all the flavors for Japanese food. But more importantly, he also taught me the grit, the work ethic. My dad, even to this day, he just works. No matter what, he would just work through whatever. He could be getting buried in service, and he would just get through it. He just works relentlessly. It’s that grit. That was definitely imparted onto me from him, and it’s important to have that [when] running a business, owning a restaurant, being a chef.

Kirk Bachmann: I love the story, first of all. I love the word, “grit.” You don’t see it everywhere. It’s hard to teach grit. When I hear you speaking, I think back on some of the things. My father, master pastry chef, came over from Germany in the sixties. Probably a very similar story. I can remember me coming on the scene and wanting to deconstruct his Black Forest torte or his apple strudel. He just wasn’t having it! He wasn’t having it. But what he did teach me was that work ethic, just like you.

He used to challenge me on questions like, “Before service, what do you do if the ice machine breaks down?” Or “What do you do if you lose power? What’s plan B?” He used to think like that.

I’ll never forget one time. We always made beef stock from bones that we could afford at the time. Maybe we’re spending twenty-five cents a pound for bones. We did the best we could, but I would always sneak veal base into the stock at the end. It used to upset him so much. “Why did you just go through this fourteen-hour process of roasting bones and vegetables and slow simmering, and then you just drop the veal stock or the veal base in?” It brings back great memories.

I didn’t know that I was learning at the time, and you probably didn’t either, but we were learning at the time. It’s part of our DNA. I love that.

In the early days, we’re all looking for recognition. You want more customers to come in, and you want them to call you a chef and all that. My father used to say to me in German, “Just try to be a cook for life. Just be a cook for life. Other people will call you whatever they call you. Whoever signs your check, it doesn’t matter. Just try to be a good cook for life.” That’s all he would say. It stuck with me.

How about your dad? Did he have some “isms” that motivated you? Or demotivated you?

Jesse Ito: One thing he always did say, when I think back, is “Today is a new day.” He would say that a lot.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, I love that.

Jesse Ito: I think that’s a lot of his philosophy. I do think that’s a beautiful way to view things. But also, he was also a man of not many words. How he taught was very [active]. He would show you.

Kirk Bachmann: I love that.

Jesse Ito: If he felt a certain way, you would see it through his actions. I would say more so, there were a lot of lessons just learned from watching because there was a lot of watching. In Japanese learning, there is a lot of watching. If you’ve watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” they have you watch them make rice for two years before you can even touch it. (Rice is actually the hardest part of sushi. We can get into that later.)

It’s more so just watching and learning patience and just seeing how hard someone works and then appreciating that.

Applying the Lessons in Real Time

Kirk Bachmann: I love the “today is a new day” concept because whether he meant this or not, you can take that even a little further when you think about seasonality and sustainability and where your food is coming from. So every day truly is a new day and can be. Love that lesson.

Now you’re eighteen. You’re running the sushi bar – a major milestone, I would imagine, based on what you just said about just being able to cook the rice. Bring it all together here, Chef. What was that like for you? By the way, you are also in the process of earning a marketing degree from Rutgers while you’re working full-time at your father’s restaurant. I’m just curious. The students that will listen to this podcast, they’d probably love to understand how you managed that as a young person. Was education important to your father, too? Was that really important that you got educated?

Jesse Ito: To both of my parents it was very important. They wanted me to go to college. I said, “I don’t need to go to college,” but they wanted me to. I only applied to two schools around here. I got a scholarship at one in Philly, but I got almost a full ride to Rutgers, so I went to Rutgers in Jersey. I just commuted; Rutgers Camden, not New Brunswick, so I just commuted to the school and went to work.

To be brutally honest, I did not manage that time very well at the beginning. My first year at college, I almost failed out because I didn’t study. I never studied. I never studied through high school. I took a lot of AP courses. I was a B [student]. Senior year I was a C student. I just never studied. I just never cared to. In college, I thought, “This isn’t an Ivy League school. It’s just my state school. It will be simple, just like high school.” And it was not. It’s definitely not. You have to study. I had to readjust how I organized my time.

Also, I was eighteen. I wanted to go out and see my friends.

Kirk Bachmann: have fun.

Jesse Ito: I did not. I did not. Actually, from nineteen to twenty-one, I don’t really remember much. I think all I did was work and [go] to school. I don’t have many memories of what I did. I don’t think I dated. It’s kind of a blur. It’s very hard to do both.

But having a business degree is a huge part of who I am today. You need to understand business principles to be a chef, more so to have a restaurant. You need to understand marketing. You need to understand financials. Marketing is huge, and I didn’t know it at the time. Marketing everyone thinks is just sales and commercials, but marketing is actually how you communicate to your market. How do you communicate your message and your value proposition to your customer? How do you find them? How do they find you? If you can understand that, you can imagine how paramount that is to having a restaurant. I have a $300 omakase, and I also have this fun vibey izakaya. Two very different markets, but actually the person who comes to both, the branding is very aligned regardless of how differential it is in pricing. I think about all that. Pricing is a huge part of marketing. There are four P’s in marketing, and pricing is one P that everyone always forgets because it’s very mathematically based. Those are huge in me becoming who I am today.

Kirk Bachmann: I appreciate that. I was going to ask you what role your studies played in running Royal and understanding how to run a restaurant. I wonder, too, do you believe that combination of studying marketing and growing up in a restaurant family, did that help or did that add pressure to your situation?

Jesse Ito: When I was in college, it actually helped me really help my parents. At that time, that was during the financial collapse of 2008, 2009. My parents’ business was positioned more in the middle. It wasn’t really cheap, high-volume. It wasn’t very expensive, intimate. It was a Jersey, suburban BYO restaurant that sells sushi and Japanese food. It’s not really cheap; it’s not really expensive. The middle gets crushed during any recession because you don’t have the margins and you don’t have the volume.

When I was learning all the things at school, I was actually applying it in real time at my parents’ business. I started doing Facebook marketing. That’s when Facebook was the main way to communicate, also. Email marketing, like iContact and Constant Contact. Those were email platforms that you could [use to] send messages out to your clientele. I re-branded the menu. I slimmed it down. I did a lot of things to just try to help streamline the operations. It did really help my parents in a really hard time. It was like learning in real time what I’m learning in school and then putting it into practice at work. I would say it was huge. It was very important to leading to where I am today.

Kirk Bachmann: Do you do some of the social media? I’m looking at it right now. Do you do some of the social media yourself, or do you have a whole team that does that for you?

Jesse Ito: I do pretty much all of it.

Kirk Bachmann: Do you really? Yeah.

Jesse Ito: I let my managers post on the Izakaya page. I personally run my own page. I take all the photos for everything that you see on there.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, do you?! That’s awesome.

Jesse Ito: [It’s rare] someone else is doing a video or a photo. Yeah, I have publicists, but they don’t do anything with social media.

Royal Izakaya

Kirk Bachmann: You have a lot of followers on both your personal and on Royal Izakaya.

Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about your baby a little bit. Minimalism is a term that I’ve seen. Beautiful is the term that I use. How did the opportunity come about? I’m really, really curious if you can go back to 2016. What was the response when you opened those doors? Was there a lot of, “Oh, the son is now opening,” or was it super, super welcoming, something new? A little bit of both?

Jesse Ito: Yeah. Three years prior, 2013, I was twenty-four. There were actually multiple. I was working the sushi bar at my dad’s restaurant. I took care of a lot of people in the restaurant business. There were actually a couple of regulars who either owned restaurants in Philadelphia or had something to do with opening restaurants in Philadelphia. Three people actually approached me about doing something in Philly, one of which was my business partner currently, David Frank, and Stephen Simons, who had just been regulars at my dad’s restaurant for decades. Just like I said Marc Vetri was a regular, Georges Perrier was a regular. A lot of the Philadelphia OG restaurant community went to my dad’s restaurant from the early days.

Dave Frank pitched it to me. They kind of pitched it as a consulting thing because they had been wanting to open an izakaya for a very long time, and it just never really came to fruition. I said, “If we do it, I want to come in as an owner. I want to sell my parents’ restaurant, and I want them to come with me because I want to take care of them.”

I feel extremely fortunate for the opportunity because, at that time, it was really hard. I can remember, we were doing fine, but it was a small BYO. It was in Jersey. We weren’t doing amazing. There was no real financial long-term game I saw. I only saw me and my parents working every day for the rest of our lives. My parents were in their sixties at that time, so I was like, this is not sustainable.

But at the same time, I wanted to do something to fulfill my own personal ambition, but I also had to take care of my parents. I couldn’t leave them behind. This opportunity allowed both things to happen. Those were always and still [are] my two main goals in what I do: to take care of my family, mainly my parents – I don’t have kids or a wife – and to fulfill my own personal ambition. Those are my main two goals in whatever I do, and everything else is just subsidiary, extracurricular, icing on the cake.

True to Who You Are and What You Value

Kirk Bachmann: No, I love that. I appreciate that. It’s a really, really good message for young people, or middle-aged people, or old people who want to get into the business.

Ironically, our ground residential campus – that student body is very young: twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four years old at the most. But our online students are definitely older: twenty-five to forty-five. They’ve done some different things. When they go to school with us, it’s usually because they’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and they need that motivation. “I want to open a restaurant. I cooked with my grandmother.” Whatever it is.

This is kind of a cliché question. I hate to ask it, but I think it’s important. Number one, biggest challenges that you faced in those early days? And number two: were there some lessons that you learned the hard way?

Jesse Ito: Also, speaking of what you just said about your students young and maybe middle-aged: one, if you’re young and you’re getting in this for fame or you want to be on TV, whatever. I guess TikTok’s a big thing. I’m not on TikTok. Those are all artificial reasons that have no grounding. When you do obtain those goals, if you do, then you’ll feel very empty because it is a goal that doesn’t resonate in your core, in who you are. It’s a very external thing. I would say you’re doing it because you love it, or you really want to do this because it’s who you are.

For the middle-aged people, I would say it’s never too late to start. I’ve owned Royal for eight years now. Even just in the last year, it’s exponentially grown. It’s never too late to start. You can accomplish so much in five years, I would say.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s great. That’s great. Really good advice.

From your perspective, I’m wondering. A lot of challenges. Lessons learned – and please share more. What was the vibe that you wanted to create? The experience – we talked with Natalia a lot about the customer experience yesterday – and have you achieved that, or are you still trying to achieve it? Or are there lessons learned?

Jesse Ito: The vibe from the get-go was on point, I would say. It’s the same vibe that we created in the beginning. The reception to opening was crazy. I wish it wasn’t as crazy because it was a little too much. There was a lot of hype. I feel like my whole life is built around hype and meeting that expectation, which adds a lot of anxiety, but I live for this. I live to execute. I want to overachieve on what the hype is. I want to be more than that.

In terms of lessons learned or just things I got wrong from the beginning, to those listening out there: big things – you can’t compromise on your values. That’s a big thing. If you’re the owner and the leader, you have to be strong in knowing who you are and what you stand for. Hopefully, those are good values, good things. Be a good person. You have to be a leader. You have to be a figurehead. It’s always better to be of the higher standard and to create that culture that everyone is trying to lift each other up to be better. Learn how to do this better. Learn how to cook better, make this service better.

The second you start to become complacent or you allow people to not reach that level or want to reach that level then it starts to skew the other way. It becomes very easy to lose control of trying to be better. It’s very human to always default to the lower standard because it’s easy. It’s easy. In order to be a leader, you have to be strong, and you have to cultivate that want of Hey, let’s build a fire in your employees. Let’s be better. Let’s do better. Let’s make great, delicious food and offer great service.

I would say that is something very hard for me because also when I opened Royal, I was twenty-seven. A lot of my employees were older than me. Looking back, I think I was kind of an idiot back then. I’ve changed so much. I was very cocky. I thought I knew a lot. Now, looking back, I don’t think I knew a lot. I didn’t know that much. I was a skilled and talented chef, but there’s so much more than being a chef or being good at cooking. You have to know how to teach. You have to know how to lead, inspire people. These are really important qualities.

I had an open Royal at the time I did. When the opportunity was presented, I had to take care of my parents. This was something I had to do. People who don’t have to open a restaurant so quickly, I would say take your time, and go work in other places and learn as much as you can and mature. Because that maturity is so important in being the boss. I would say that. If I could go back in time, I wish I could have waited five years. Then I could have maybe left Philly and worked around and learned from other people. Because it’s not just about learning how to cook; it’s just learning how to be a person. It’s learning how to be a leader, and that takes a lot of time.

Omakase: Chef’s Choice

Kirk Bachmann: Really well said. You said something really important and ironic. You said that you focus on execution. We talked before we started this show a little bit about the Philadelphia Eagles. I’m a sports fanatic. My fourteen-year-old boy is following me down that path. I went to the University of Oregon. 12-0, number one team in the country right now. Their coach is Dan Lanning, and literally last night, Chef – last night – I was showing my son a video of him getting his team pumped up, demonstrating leadership.

And he said, “Lose the emotion. Focus on execution.” Lose the emotion. Focus on execution, which I’m now going to make my mantra right here. But it makes so much sense. You can get emotional about anything that you do. That’s fine, but it’s about execution.

And I want to parlay that into my next question that a lot of people really may not be familiar with. But the omakase this concept of the chef’s table, if you will, or the chef’s menu. Can you talk a little bit about how important that is in Japanese cuisine or in your restaurant specifically? Because you do a lot of that yourself, right?

Jesse Ito: Yeah. I personally do the service feeding the eight people at a time, sixteen people a night. It is, I think, the most expensive restaurant in the city. It is probably one of the hardest reservations to get in the country at this point. There’s a lot of expectation. Also, a lot of people who come are regulars. They have discerning palates. They are not just coming to hang out with me; they’re coming to have a great meal, and I hope that it will continue to evolve. That is so much pressure on me to continue on my journey of becoming better. How do I make this better?

Omakase, it means to leave it up to the chef. You are putting your trust into the chef that they’re going to get the best ingredients and prepare it the best way that they can for you.

Sushi in itself is just about the highest execution. That is one of the biggest differentiators from good to great in sushi. It’s technique. It’s technical execution at its core. You can come up with different flavor profiles. You can come up with different dishes, but at the very core of what Japanese omakase is and sushi omakase is rice. How do you make your rice? How do you season it and your technique on that? That’s not something you can buy. Anyone can go buy a nice fancy fish and spend a lot of money on a beautiful tuna and serve it just at night, and it will probably be delicious. But how do you make the most amazing rice – the shari – that you can? That takes years, decades to learn. When customers eat that for the first time and they haven’t had that before, they can just immediately say, “I have never eaten sushi before until this moment.” And then they only eat [quality.] A high-caliber restaurant that does that. The rice has to be a certain temperature. The fish has to be a certain temperature.

Temperature is one of the most important ingredients in food that people don’t think about. If something is supposed to be hot, be hot! Don’t serve it lukewarm or cold. If something is supposed to be cold, it should be cold, right? Rice is supposed to be warm, closer to body temperature, and the fish should be closer to room temperature. It shouldn’t be frigid. These highlight the nuances of the flavors, the textures. It’s all about execution, all about technique.

Kirk Bachmann: I love that. I want to stay on the theme here. I love the menu created by the chef. I looked up – and I’m not sure if this was your goal – but I looked up izakaya, and what I discovered is that term can be related to a gastro pub. That would be the easiest thing. But more than anything, it’s a place to gather. Do I have that somewhat correct? Is that what you were shooting for when you opened up your first restaurant?

Jesse Ito: It is similar to a gastro pub, a tavern, a place to gather. Izakaya literally means “to stay and drink sake.” It was based on Sakaya’s sake shops hundreds of years ago. They started just offering little bites to keep guests there so they could drink the sake and eat something. It turned into an izakaya, a Japanese sake bar where they serve food.

So I have this omakase inside of an izakaya. I think that’s what makes Royal very unique and comfortable for the guests because you have that bustling, cool, dark izakaya all around the omakase. It kind of emanates into the omakase room because there is no wall separating it. There’s just a noren curtain.

I have all my music playlists. There’s no sound system in the omakase room, but it is all coming into it. It’s all background noise. That’s what relaxes the people there. Even though you’re having this high-end experience, it feels almost casual.

Music and Fast Cars

Kirk Bachmann: You just mentioned music. It triggers [a memory.] Most of the chefs that I’ve had on the show, we laugh a little bit because we talked about, with chefs, it’s motorcycles, maybe. Is it motorcycles for you?

Jesse Ito: I like fast cars.

Kirk Bachmann: I’ll take that. I’ll take that. And then music. This is not on the script, but you mentioned it, so I’ve got to go there. Top three bands of all time. Go.

Jesse Ito: Top three bands? Oh, man. Put me on the spot. Lauren Hill, OutKast. Oh man. There are so many rock people out there. I have to think about a third. There are too many. I love Martin Hill and I love OutKast. And we’ll come back to it when I think of it.

Kirk Bachmann: I love that. Those are great responses.

Jesse Ito: I love Lauren Hill and I love OutKast. And we’ll come back to it when I think of it.
Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, come back to it. I get the vibe. I get the vibe. I always go U2 first. I’m just reverent of Bono and the band, for many things, not just the music. Crazy, off-the-cuff story. Years and years and years ago, I was at Red Rocks just showing a friend the amphitheater. It was on a Saturday afternoon. U2 was playing. This was a long time ago, Chef. It was the eighties. It was before the Rattle and Hum tour. It’s a long time. It could have been Joshua Tree – it probably was – and U2 was rehearsing. These days, Bono had really long hair and Edge had hair. So we sat there in Red Rocks in that amphitheater by ourselves and listened to them rehearse for about an hour and half. It was insane.

Beyond that, I’m a little bit of a blues. You’re going to laugh, but I love listening to Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee. Just love it. It’s so different. It drives my wife crazy because she’s a Dave Matthews, hands-down, no matter what, Dave Matthews.

I think it says a lot. You mentioned Bobby Stuckey earlier. He’s got a really, really cool place in Denver called Sunday Vinyl. He’s really big into albums. Every night, he selects what album they’re going to play during service. Do you know Curtis Duffy, the name? Chef in Chicago. He’s got a place called Ever.

Jesse Ito: Oh, I know Ever.

Kirk Bachmann: So Curtis Duffy is a big, big music fan. He’s a friend of the school as well. He’s a little bit more Nine Inch Nails.

Jesse Ito: I love Nine Inch Nails.

Kirk Bachmann: I could do a whole podcast with a chef about fast cars, motorcycles, planes and music because there’s always music playing. And tattoos. Curtis is tatted up as well.

Jesse Ito: I have a seven-hundred horsepower Mitsubishi Evolution that I don’t ever drive anymore. It’s in storage.

Kirk Bachmann: I knew it! I knew it.

Jesse Ito: I drive it once a year for like two minutes. My goal is eventually to join the New Jersey Millville race track when I’m older. It will be my golf course, the race track.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s your golf course. Yeah.

Jesse Ito: It’s a circuit. It’s not drag. I would love to go there on Sundays and race. The adrenaline you get from racing and the turns just on the apex and braking. There’s nothing like it. I really enjoy that.

And my third artist – I thought about it more – is Al Green. Definitely Al Green.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, yes! I love that you’re thinking about it. I have to jot those down because I track these. I love it. I love it.

Every Friday here at the campus, I send out the Friday morning dance party. I pick the music, and I send out a little YouTube video just to get people pumped up and going. I love that conversation.

Jesse Ito: It’s so important for the restaurant. My music playlists, I listen to every single song, and I build them. I build the playlists. I think the main thing that if you own a restaurant [you have to realize] not all the music you like is right for your restaurant. I always tell myself, “I love this song, but I can’t play it. I like this artist, but this doesn’t fit the vibe.”

To me, when I think of creating a restaurant, creating a vibe, I think of every diner as the main character energy. They are the main characters in their own movies, and when they’re coming to eat, it’s a scene. What does that scene look like? How do you capture that feeling? Music is a huge part of it.

Kirk Bachmann: I love it. I love it. There’s going to have to be a part two because we should probably have in our curriculum the whole idea of how you create ambiance in a restaurant. From the architecture to the-

Dance Robot

Jesse Ito: We’re doing that right now for Dance Robot, and I’m just going crazy about it.

Kirk Bachmann: Let’s talk about it. That was next on my list. So that’s right there in Rittenhouse, right? Right down the street. Set to open next year. Can we talk about it?

Jesse Ito: Yeah. It’s set to open hopefully in the late spring or summer of 2025. It’s in Rittenhouse on 17th and Sansom, which is an amazing location. It’s on the same block as one of my favorite chef-owners – Her Place Supper Club – Amanda Shulman, and a block over is Dizengoff by Michael Solomonov. He’s also a good friend of mine.

Dance Robot – the name, right?

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, I was just going to ask.

Jesse Ito: It is going to be a very high-energy, fun Japanese izakaya, but also doing weekend brunch, Japanese brunch, which no one does in Philadelphia. A lot of takes on Japanese comfort food or, alternatively, takes on American comfort food but done Japanese. There’s actually no sushi there, which is huge. Finally, eight years in, we can get away from having sushi or ramen. Oh my God. Japanese cuisine is so stuck to those things.

Kirk Bachmann: Well, because people like it. You’ll create a new genre. What are you looking forward to the most with that expansion, other than no rice? No sushi.

Jesse Ito: We’re going to have to make rice, but it won’t be sushi rice.

Kirk Bachmann: It won’t be sushi rice. Yeah.

Jesse Ito: If you read former interviews or lists of older podcasts, I said I was probably never going to open something else. The only way I was ever going to open something is if I was extremely passionate about it. I told my business partners this a few years ago: I’m only interested in opening institutions, something that’s going to be around twenty-plus years. I’m not interested in management deals. I’m not interested in “let’s get in and out,” which you can do. I want to open something that’s going to be here twenty years later.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah. That’s noble. I love that.

Jesse Ito: It has to be something that’s ambition, something that isn’t done yet. When I opened Royal Sushi Izakaya, there was no real izakaya. There was no sushi omakase yet in Philadelphia. It was the first one. This will be the first of its kind. It’s really just a Japanese restaurant without any sushi or ramen. That just doesn’t exist much.

Kirk Bachmann: Have others followed you and tried to open up with similar concepts?

Jesse Ito: I don’t own omakase. The concept has been around long before me. It sent the beacon of saying, “All right, let’s go.” I think that’s good for the city. I don’t want to be the only one. I don’t want to be the only thing in town.

Hard to be Human

Kirk Bachmann: It’s great for the city. It’s great. And it just raises the bar [and] continues to motivate you, as well.

Can we, if you’re comfortable with it, just to shift gears a tiny bit because it’s important – I’d love to talk just a little bit about mental health, particularly in our industry. You’ve been open about your journey, therapy, sobriety. The stress of restaurant ownership. Chef, was there a specific moment in your career that you realized that you needed to really focus on your mental health?

Jesse Ito: Yeah. I would say a little over four years ago I actually became sober fully. December 1 was my four-year anniversary for sobriety.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s amazing.

Jesse Ito: At that time, I also started seeing a therapist who specializes in drug addiction or alcoholism, that stuff. It became obvious that therapy and mental health is just huge. I started realizing everyone should have this or try to have this. I know it can be expensive, so it’s not the most accessible thing. It’s so important, all of those.

It’s really hard to just be human. Sober or not, it’s really hard to be human. You don’t really know how to deal with emotions or conflict, and a lot of people I feel self-medicate through many different things, not just drugs or alcohol. It could be shopping, sex, gambling, playing video games, eating. It could be anything that you could just be numbing yourself with, and I think a lot of people do that. It’s just normal to try to get away from the conflict or the anxiety or the bad feelings.

I think especially men kind of scoff at the idea of mental health. I know I used to. I see it in my younger employees, especially the guys, when I say, “I think you should maybe see someone, or talk to someone.” They’re like, “Nah.” I think it’s really important and something that everyone should talk about how important it is. And to remove the stigma of it because it only makes you better. It only makes you a better employee, a better employer, a better partner, friend, family, all of it.

The Love of Dishware

Kirk Bachmann: Have ceramics – I loved reading that you were into photography. Now I know, because you’re putting some of it on your social media channels. And ceramics. Ironically enough, we sublease a little space here which is a ceramic studio for kids as well as, around the corner on the other side, is a therapeutic ceramic studio for adults. It’s actually a club. You have to be a member. It’s super, super cool. How long have you been involved in those pastimes?

Jesse Ito: Since freshman year of high school.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh really!

Jesse Ito: I took all the photography and pottery classes that I could, and my teachers always told me that I should probably try to do it professionally. I didn’t, but I incorporated it into my professional world. It shaped how I look at food and design and everything, which are all critical in owning a restaurant or being a chef.

Kirk Bachmann: And flatware and plates. Do you find yourself going into a restaurant and immediately lifting up to see where they’re buying the things?

Jesse Ito: It’s funny because when I go to a restaurant, I like a plate. I always lift it up and look at the back. “Where’s this from? What is it?”

Kirk Bachmann: I do, too. I do, too.

Jesse Ito: I obsess over dishware. If you ever can come to Royal one day, you’ll see, especially at the omakase. I buy amazing ceramics and plateware and glassware from Japan. It lifts up the food. It elevates it so much.

Jesse Ito’s Ultimate Dish

Kirk Bachmann: And it tells a story. It gets people talking. I love that. And I will come. I will come. We’ll drag Noelle there as well and have a great time.

Chef, we’ve kept you so long today. I’m so appreciative, but I can’t let you go. The name of the show is The Ultimate Dish. Whether it’s a memory or a specific seventeen courses or just one dish, in your mind, what is the ultimate dish?

Jesse Ito: I would say easy. Mexico City, there’s this one taco stand. They just braise the pig head, and they chop up all the bits. It was a taco with all of the braised pig’s head parts. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever eaten in my life, and I can’t wait to go back to Mexico City.

Kirk Bachmann: Really? Really! Corn tortilla?

Jesse Ito: Yeah. It was just so…I think a taco is like the most perfect thing.

Kirk Bachmann: I was not expecting that, but I love that response. I absolutely [love it].

Jesse Ito: Sushi nigiri is technically a perfect bite, but a taco you can implement a lot more things. Meats, temperatures. It’s very different.

Kirk Bachmann: And spice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Ito: I would say that. That’s the ultimate dish.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s the perfect answer. Really, really great.

Jesse Ito: The only thing I feel bad I didn’t say is I didn’t mention my chef as a business partner at the restaurant.

Kirk Bachmann: What’s his name?

Jesse Ito: Justin Bacharach is going to be the chef partner at Dance Robot. I’m excited. He’s a friend, and he’s worked at Royal Izakaya the past four years as the chef of the izakaya. I’m very excited to have him joining on board. I definitely just wanted to mention that.

Kirk Bachmann: And with that, we’re going to say thank you, thank you, thank you. Much, much more success. So wonderful to meet you. Thanks for being so transparent and honest and generous with your time. I wish you a tremendous holiday and good luck with the new restaurant. Thanks for joining us.

Jesse Ito: Thanks, Kirk, you, too. Thank you for having me.

Kirk Bachmann: Thank you for listening to the Ultimate Dish podcast, brought to you by Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Visit escoffier.edu/podcast to find any materials mentioned during the podcast, including notes, links and other resources. And if you can, please leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, and subscribe to support our show. This helps us reach more aspiring individuals ready to take the next step toward their dream careers. Thanks for listening.