Latest news with #Inak
Los Angeles Times
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Lone-chef restaurants and why we love them
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.
Los Angeles Times
11-03-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Running a restaurant in L.A. seems impossible. So this chef has one employee — himself
Chef Okay Inak, who grew up in Turkey and spent time in New York cooking at fine-dining institutions Per Se and Eleven Madison Park as well as Mélisse in L.A., is alone in his tiny 16-seat restaurant on an industrial stretch of 12th Street in downtown L.A. It's his 'day off,' which he spends prepping food for the week. Inak has no other staff at Sora because the financial landscape for restaurants in L.A. is soberingly challenging. His only employee is himself. Inak and his wife, Sezen Vatansever, who is a doctor and researcher for a pharmaceutical company, opened Sora Craft Kitchen in May 2024 with no help from investors. In a time when opening and sustaining a successful restaurant in Los Angles seems impossible, they are approaching it in a way they believe is sustainable. 'Since we opened the restaurant with our own life savings,' says Vatansever, 'we have a very limited budget, so that for now, under these economical conditions, financial conditions, this is the only sustainable way. He cannot hire another chef. He cannot hire a cleaning person or server.' Standing behind a counter that faces a dining room of simple white tables and brown box stools, Inak forms perfect spheres of ground meat that he has been slow-cooking with caramelized onions and Turkish yenibahar spice for hours. He lightly flattens the meat in his hands into a patty, then wraps it in a smooth thin piece of bulgur wheat dough, a recipe he learned from his late mother whose photo is on the wall across from where he stands. 'It's very hard to make. It takes me like eight hours, 10 hours,' says Inak of the kitels that he boils during service and serves over homemade yogurt with mint chive oil and drizzles with Aleppo pepper-infused butter. Though running a restaurant completely alone sounds overwhelming, chef Inak doesn't seem to mind this approach. 'Actually, this is my prep day, I'm really happy because I'm alone. I have my own timeline,' he says, and the peace and quiet of a kitchen all to himself. But when the restaurant is open for dinner service, the scene is slightly different. Tall flames burn on the stove behind him as he juggles grilling garlic kebabs, clearing and wiping down tables while plating a plump filet of charred-on-the-grill branzino that he buries in herbs and sliced pickled radishes. A regular customer, who is dining with his family, approaches him and asks him in Turkish for hot water for his child's bottle of milk, which Inak provides swiftly and happily. Inak and Vatansever stress that a chef-focused restaurant where the chefs interact with the guests, was always the plan, not only because he wants chefs to become more visible but also so they can get paid more. If and when he can afford to hire another employee, it will only be another chef, not a server or dishwasher, because he wants to create a system where chefs receive tips and can therefore earn a living wage. Typically under labor laws, servers are considered tipped employees while chefs are not. 'He worked at the best restaurants in the world, and chefs cannot make money in the restaurants. We know that,' says Vatansever. Sora seems to be their answer to this. 'If we do everything,' says Inak, referring to serving, bussing, clearing tables, washing dishes, cleaning and anything else that comes with running a restaurant, 'we make money together.' 'My guests, they love that I serve the food,' he says, noting that at Mélisse the chefs cook and serve. Other fine-dining restaurants operate similarly. 'I know this neighborhood is not fancy,' he says, admitting that he gets few walk-ins. He said the building had a lot of problems that he fixed himself. And despite little foot traffic, he takes pride in the rapport he has built with a loyal clientele that comes from all over L.A. 'My budget is lower, and the rent is very important for me. Santa Monica, Venice, West Hollywood or Arts District is crazy expensive. It's impossible, you know? And then I found this place [with] very low rent.' In addition to the 16-hour-plus days, there are other downsides to having no employees. Three months after opening Sora last May, just as the restaurant was beginning to gain momentum, Inak was washing a glass water jug before service when it shattered and severed a tendon in his left hand, requiring surgery. 'The hand surgeon told him not to work for three months,' says Vatansever. 'It really was devastating.' With no one to fill in, he was forced to close the restaurant for three months. 'However, it gave him time to rethink his cuisine.' In that time Inak describes developing his pickle recipes, the jars of which now line the shelves of Sora. Since reopening, Sora has seen steady growth. But Inak's dream is to be able to serve the kind of food he has been cooking for years. 'He has big dreams,' says Vatansever. 'This actually creates a limiting factor for him. He wants to serve more sophisticated and more complicated dishes because he worked at three-Michelin-star restaurants for many years, and now he cannot actually show his full potential because the complicated and more sophisticated dishes require a team of workers and better equipment.' That said, everything about Sora is exactly how they intended it to be. 'Almost everything in the restaurant is secondhand,' she says, 'We always wanted a place which can be sustainable, zero waste. It's about the philosophy. It's about the values we have. We never wanted to open a brand-new, million-dollar restaurant.'
Los Angeles Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
This dumpling reveals all at a Turkish restaurant like no other in L.A.
Kibbeh, the improbably delicate union of bulgur and spiced ground meat, is a shape-shifter of a dish. Its name adapts to languages and dialects throughout southwestern Asian countries; in Turkey, it goes by içli köfte. Many of us know kibbeh best as football-shaped croquettes we crack open to reveal the fragrant, juicy-crumbly filling, but the combination of ingredients can take many guises. Local kibbeh specialists like Kobee Factory in Van Nuys and Aleppo's Kitchen in Anaheim present several of the possible geometries: the familiar tapered spheres, stuffed rounds grilled over grates, a pan version etched with lovely motifs before baking, variations molded into cigars or rings, or served in carefully simmered sauces made from yogurt or a seasonal blend of citrus juices and tahini. Amid all these possibilities, the one Okay Inak toils over solo at his 16-seat restaurant Sora Craft Kitchen in downtown L.A. is singular: He takes the core elements and transforms them into something else entirely, forged from family memories. Inak grew up not far from Istanbul, though his mother is from a tiny city in southeastern Turkey called Bitlis. She made a specific variation of içli köfte called kitel, working ground bulgur to a smooth dough she would pat into palm-size discs, fill and boil. Intense amounts of allspice and black pepper flavored the meat inside. Inak said that she would spend hours preparing kitel for him and his father and brothers, and then grow annoyed when they wolfed them down without appropriately savoring her exertions. But Inak did remember, and the presentation at Sora invites slow appreciation. His rendition, which he says closely resembles his mother's, is essentially a large oval dumpling. The casing has yielding bounce. Spices darken and complicate the finely textured beef. Plating borrows from the fine-dining playbook: The kitel arrives in a ceramic bowl cast in shades of milk and dark chocolates, sitting on thickened yogurt with drizzles of dill-scented herb oil, butter sparked with Aleppo pepper and a finishing tablespoon of meat sauce intensified with chile oil. It's soothing to gaze down onto the uneven circles and bleeding earth tones. The flavors convey the key meat-grain-spice triumvirate, but the dish's sum also brings to mind the contrasts in the saucing of Iskender kebab. Though Sora is Inak's first restaurant, he has years of culinary experience, and it shows: The short menu plays straight to his talents and thrillingly conveys a clear command of the story behind his cooking. He blends autobiography, born of a locally underrepresented cuisine, and an intellectual creativity driven by curiosity for the world. It's an approach, when done well, that food-loving Angelenos recognize and welcome. During his childhood, Inak's family ran a seasonal seafood shack in a tourist town situated on the Sea of Marmara. The kitchen called; his first adult gig was at a Japanese restaurant in Istanbul. (Sora is a Japanese word meaning 'sky,' or 'the heavens.') His wife, Sezen Vatansever, is a doctor and pharmaceutical researcher. When her career took her to New York and then Los Angeles, Inak sought out work at tasting-menu temples: Eleven Madison Park and Per Se in Manhattan, Mélisse in Santa Monica. During the pandemic, he drove a truck for a while. He joked in a recent conversation that every small town in America he drove through seemed to have three Italian restaurants and one sushi bar. The couple self-funded Sora, which opened nearly a year ago and then closed for several months while Inak recovered from a hand injury. He handles all the daily operations alone: prepping, cooking, serving, cleaning. 'Hi, you're being recorded,' says a woman's automated voice as you approach the restaurant's door. The space resides on a fairly desolate, well-lit block with lots of parking. Her tone is cheerful to the point of ominous. The moment wouldn't be out of place on 'Severance.' Any foreboding ends there. Walk into the tiny dining room, warmed with light woods and plants, and Inak looks up to greet you from the open kitchen. Place your order on a mounted touchscreen pad by the door. He'll gesture you toward an empty table. At lunch, he serves a friendly mix of chicken and beef kebab bowls, falafel and fried chicken in pita punched up with pickled cucumber and pepper jam. It's solid sustenance, but dinner is when the bangers appear. Look for corti taplamasi, a cloudy, red-orange soup made from cabbage fermented for three weeks, an optimum length of time during which the sour, salty tang hits peak deliciousness. The small, soft, hand-rolled balls knocking around in the broth? Leftover bulgur dough from making kitel. The soup also pulls from Inak's mother's repertoire. The dessert called kirecte kabak is his father's specialty. Chunks of butternut squash (it would be pumpkin in Turkey) soak in limewater overnight. The calcium hydroxide creates an effect in that when the squash cooks, its exterior retains a thin, crackling shell while the inside melts to cream. I've had something similar only once, with papaya treated in the same way at a now-closed Oaxacan restaurant called Pasillo de Humo in Mexico. At Sora, the squash arrives nearly translucent, sweetened with simple syrup, splattered with tahini and flecked with crushed pistachios. It is incredible and a little otherworldly. Focus on these dishes and you'll feel Turkish ground beneath your feet. Two seafood entrees lean into showcasing more global techniques, impressively. A fillet of grilled branzino is all crisp skin and mild flavor, covered with a bed of soft herbs and gentle pickles. A hidden slick of nori chimichurri tastes as mulchy and garlicky and oceanic as it sounds. Yuzu kosho gives a bowl of shrimp some brightness and heat, but its deeper umami flavors come from butter ingeniously infused with tarhana, a paste of fermented yogurt and grains that's been made for centuries and is most commonly reconstituted as a soup base. Easygoing staples can fill out the meal: hummus squiggled with avocado puree; a deconstructed tzatziki in which you swirl together labneh, cucumber and olive oil with hunks of pita; and a nicely seasoned kebab over oniony salad. But I doubt you'll be rushing here for staples. You'd hurry to taste regional Turkish dishes you can't find anywhere else in Los Angeles, by a chef who also has a modernist knack and a roaming imagination. Will his style continue to straddle two realms? Will his young restaurant tip more in one direction? We'll have to show up and find out.
