Kato, a Michelin-starred tasting menu spot in Los Angeles, represents intersecting immigrant communities across the city, specifically in the San Gabriel Valley, where chef Jon Yao grew up. The 2025 James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: California prepares two tasting menus in his DTLA restaurant: a seasonal dining room version and shorter menu in the bar.
First, Yao preps his recreation of Zī Rán Yáng, a cumin lamb stir fry dish from Northern China, with thick slices of aged lamb saddles cooked over a hearth and dusted with Kato’s cumin spice blend. Rather than hoping for diners to have that “Ratatoiulle moment,” where the chef has created a dish that perfectly encapsulates a food memory from their childhood, Yao says he wants “them to feel some sense of nostalgia regardless of what background they come from.”
A day at Kato starts with morning sous chef Jivani Roldan prepping the dashi, a Japanese fish and kombu (dried seaweed) broth, by painstakingly shaving petrified skipjack tuna, cooking down the broth, and double straining it. Yao and Roldan check on the dozens of air-drying quail in the walk-in refrigerator, which Yao jokes is the same size as Kato’s former kitchen in West LA. These quails are dry-aged, cured overnight, and air-dried for a few days before being coated in a maltose bath, lacquered in a sugar mixture, and lightly smoked before dinner service even starts. Yao believes all these small details in the process of prepping these dishes “compounds” to create something extraordinary.
Executive sous chef Alan Thau preps the crab, pulling all the meat out of the steamed shells with tweezers and then shining a black light over the crab meat to thoroughly check for any bits 0f shell. Those crab shells are toasted in the oven and added to chicken stock, recreating the taste of shark fin soup, a delicacy in China and Southeast Asia, without having to use shark fins. Dry-aged sablefish is also prepped, cut down into 50 gram portions, and marinated in sour cabbage and mustard green broth, giving it a fermented flavor.
Two hours before service, components of each dish are meticulously laid out on trays for Yao to taste, so he can make sure each sauce, custard, glaze, and prepped ingredient is ready for service. The kitchen has a complete turnover before service, with Yao talking through any adjustments to the menu and guest’s dietary restrictions before the frenzy of plating the first course.
Yao describes the 11 to 12 course dining room menu as having “pits and peaks throughout,” with plenty of starches and protein-filled courses throughout the meal. The quail is bathed in hot oil and baked in the oven and the sablefish is grilled and cooked in the hearth, before being plated. Diners leaving Kato should not only feel satiated but “proud of their heritage,” Yao says. “That’s the beauty of fine dining right now. You get a lot of different stories and visions and opinions and perspectives. It’s not so homogenous.”
Watch the latest episode of Mise en Place to see how Yao and his team at Kato prepare crispy lamb, succulent quail, and seared sablefish at one of the hottest restaurants in Los Angeles.
