knight's table.

Uchiko sake social happy hour

yoshi okai

4 weeks in at Uchiko, and my the fun continues! Starting to figure out logistics of service and booking for our PDR, last week we did an 18 top in the center of the room as the picture shows….and they loved it! I can’t wait to open up the brass window and serve food directly from the kitchen once we start to get more PDR reses. It was such a fun atmosphere with everyone sitting at a large table like this, and just happened to be all men including one Texas ranger; yes, they were like the knight’s of the round table. All that was missing was a sword in a stone in the corner.

Uchiko’s eat-in bar is coming along too. We’ve been diligent on keeping our blackboard of daily specials and sake happy hour deals every day. Once word of mouth picks up this is going to be crazy, b/c the idea of sitting at a bar as nice as this and eating Uchi food for half the price is nuts! Once it does pick up we’ll start kicking out a ton of new items and dishes form the kitchen available in the bar area only too.

Picture of Yoshi Okai who was the head sushi chef at Uchiko and is now departing. Yoshi worked at Uchi for 6 years and was a vital part of our success over the years. Thanks Yoshi and good luck!

It’s been a while since my last post because things are in full effect all around me daily lately. Uchiko is just under a month old and the opening of it has been nothing short of reality TV material. Lots of bright hopeful faces ready to stand out and excel, but unfortunately there always have to be cuts and some peeps just didn’t make the last few. Sad. I hope they take with them the experience of opening something so grand and with such hard work and dedication it’s taken just to get things off the ground; (it’s not even full tilt yet!)

It’s such a hard thing in hiring and searching for the best people for the job that they fit in the best to give them and us the best possible chance for success. Seems like 2 roads that always coincide:

1. hire people with little experience for less money and hope they can buy into the culture and pick things up very quickly to flourish. This methodology works some of the time, but more often than not it ends up with people who might not have known quite what they were getting into, and how much real time at work and and away from work it would take to truly be great and up to Uchi standards. It takes more than just showing up to work on time; it takes living and breathing the desire for perfection that the real talent possess at every level of the very great restaurants of the world.

2. hire people with lots of experience specifically in certain key areas. This method is the most traditional, but what we’ve found at Uchi over the years it sometimes ends up backfiring b/c you get people with pre set expectations, senses of entitlement, and people who a lot of the time have been taught very bad habits and techniques from places they worked in the past.

SO, we we’re torn and tried to charter a path between these 2 usual hiring processes with getting Uchiko open,trained and ready to go. We/i have learned some valuable lessons. I guess you can bet on a certain % of  success when it comes to staffing; it’s a metaphor of life. For every failure you have, a success is usually right behind it to follow. That’s the odds. I’m so proud of everyone that’s put in the time and effort in opening our new restaurant,Uchiko. I promise i’ll do whatever it takes from here to bring it to the prominence that’s it’s older sibling has been so fortunate to receive before her.

ON another note: The Uchi Cookbook is close to completed. Photography and writing both handed in this week for review, and we’ll start to piece it all together with Pentagram over the upcoming months!

Jay

grilled cuttlefish,petit sorrel,green tomato,red curry

soft chocolate

sea urchin butter

Close to the end of week #3 at Uchiko and things are coming along. Food and recipes all locked down and execution is getting better by the day. My staff rocks!  New changes afoot for the sushi rolls part of the Uchiko menu; i think some people are gonna freak out on how good some of these new rolls will be! I’ve got one based on a Thai lamb dish called “tiger cry”, but made with wagyu beef and another using our pork belly katsu fried in the roll with an egg yolk sauce Phil came up with that we’re tentatively calling “ham and eggs”.

The pic of our ika salad at Uchiko and it’s new presentation. Totally in love with this dish and it’s textures,spice and savory pop.

The Uchi cookbook final formatting, pics and script deadline is Aug. 1 so work is getting pretty frenzied. Rebecca Fondren has taken some awesome photos including this one of one of Uchi’s “components” called “uni butter”. Jessica Dupuy and i have been working on the script for months and i can’t wait to sit down soon with Pentagram and start putting all the pieces together and get this thing complete!