Lone-chef restaurants and why we love them

Los Angeles Times

15-03-2025

The joy of solo-chef restaurants. Plus, a burger diner that honors Nipsey Hussle's legacy, three new food guides to bagels, pickles and halal restaurants. Also, feel-good soups to make this weekend. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes.
The 'Yes, Chef!' culture of restaurants — in which a hierarchical brigade of cooking professionals work diligently under a visionary leader — has become ingrained in TV shows, movies and many of our own eating experiences. Most restaurants couldn't operate without a dedicated team of chefs, servers, dishwashers and bussers.
But once in awhile, we come across a rare-bird, one-chef restaurant, an intimate place where regulars often sit at a counter and get an up-close view of their food being prepared by a single man or woman, who for one reason or another has decided to go it alone at the stove.
The ideal of this lone-chef restaurant is the all-night counter spot at the heart the Japanese TV and Netflix series 'Midnight Diner,' which soothed so many of us during the pandemic. Kaoru Kobayashi plays the unnamed chef known to his customers as 'Master.' As the series' poignant theme song plays first over neon-lit scenes of Tokyo's Shinjuku district and then zeros in on the diner's immediate neighborhood of narrow alleyways, we watch the Master preparing tonjiru, or pork miso soup, which is the restaurant's only dish on the menu — though the Master famously makes anything his customers ask for, 'as long as I have ingredients for it,' he says in the opening. The show is, as critic at large John Powers said awhile back on NPR's 'Fresh Air,' 'the TV version of comfort food.'
This week, I ate at a real-life lone-chef restaurant, Sora Craft Kitchen, in downtown Los Angeles. Ever since deputy food editor Betty Hallock mentioned Sora, I've been wanting to try the 16-seat restaurant run by Okay Inak, who has an impressive number of 'Yes, Chef!'-style kitchens on his resume, including New York's Eleven Madison Park and Per Se, and Mélisse in Santa Monica. But with Tuesday's publication of critic Bill Addison's rave review of Sora, I knew I had to hustle to get there. I'll let Addison tell you all about the food — and contributor Heather Platt has a wonderful companion feature all about Inak's story and how he operates the restaurant with not even one server or cleaning person. But I do have to add that our critic is right to obsess over the kitel, a beef-filled Turkish dumpling, which in Inak's hands, as Addison writes, has a 'yielding bounce' and 'flavors [that] convey the key meat-grain-spice triumvirate.' It's fantastic.
There are only two counter seats in the dining room with multiple tables, but Inak is an engaging host as he brings your food out and tells you about your meal. Perhaps he'll share that the Dram cardamom and black tea sparkling water you selected from the menu is his favorite. In fact, if you are bored with La Croix, I highly recommend this sparkling water. Who knew cardamom would be such a good addition to water?
Beyond the food and drink, there is a wonderful sense of discovery about lone-chef restaurants. The vibe in the dining room the night I ate there was one of excitement and a one-for-all conviviality with Sora's customers rooting for Inak to succeed while also hoping that the restaurant's charm and intimacy remains as more people find out about the place.
That intimacy plus one's sense of being in on a secret is what draws many of us to small-scale restaurants like Sora. I think this is why we love sushi bars so much in Los Angeles.
The more traditional sushi experience begat more personal L.A. restaurants that at first glance have the appearance of sushi bars but go beyond their traditional structure. I'm thinking of places like Brandon Hayato Go's seven-seat spot Hayato and Ki Kim's still-very-new 10-seat Restaurant Ki, which is forging a fresh path for fine Korean dining and, as Stephanie Breijo writes this week, was just added to Michelin's 2025 California guide. One pioneer in this current wave of intimate dining is Gary Menes' Le Comptoir, which follows a garden-to-counter approach to California French cooking at his 10-seat Koreatown spot. None of these restaurants, which require a higher financial investment than Sora Craft Kitchen, are strictly solo-chef restaurants — their staffs are tiny and caring — but each chef's individual vision comes through when there are fewer diners to feed.
This isn't a restaurant model that will solve the problems many are facing in a climate of rising food and labor costs — Inak, who works 16-hour days was forced to close his restaurant for three months when he severed a tendon in his hand and had to recover from surgery. But as diners, we can be grateful that these small restaurants with big ambitions have found a home in our city.
'A bagel renaissance is boiling over in Los Angeles,' writes senior food editor Danielle Dorsey. Since we first published our guide to L.A.'s best bagels in 2023, even more shops and regional styles have emerged, from out-of-towners looking for a foothold in our increasingly competitive bagel town (Bagel Boss, Boichik) to the Highland Park pop-up Mustard's Bagels, which regularly sells out of its 72-hour-fermented sourdough bagels. Dorsey, Addison, Hallock, Stephanie Breijo, Jenn Harris and Sarah Mosqueda all contributed to the updated guide. My everyday bagel — which I used to find at Altadena Beverage and Market until the Eaton fire shut it down (it's still standing but has yet to raise enough money to reopen) — is the properly dense poppy seed bagel with scallion cream cheese from Maury's Bagels in Silver Lake. It's worth the drive from Pasadena to Silver Lake.
More in restaurants:
About this time a year ago, Michelle Huneven wrote about her 'soup for dinner' diet with some incredible recipes. This year Carolynn Carreño came through with a new batch of fantastic soup recipes that we couldn't stop eating when she came to the Times Test Kitchen to make them. There was lentil and kale soup with crunchy, buttery croutons; broccoli-fennel soup inspired, Carreño says, by one that Gino Angelini makes at Osteria Angelini; and an Italian winter vegetable soup with kale, rutabaga, carrots, fennel, crushed tomatoes and beans plus Parmesan rind for umami. As we head to spring on this chilly weekend, soup sounds exactly right.