The Elysian is a mod apartment building originally designed in the 1960s by architect William Pereira. The original LACMA campus also numbered among Pereira’s projects, as did my favorite skyscraper on the planet, the TransAmerica Building in San Francisco. This one sits on a hill, overlooking Sunset Boulevard, in Victor Heights, the small neighborhood abutting Elysian Park and bordering Echo Park and Chinatown.
I timed my drive to a lull in traffic after the start of a Dodgers game this week to visit the Elysian’s new ground-floor tenant, Morihiro, and a couple major shifts the relocation brings: a walk-in cocktail bar and an a la carte component to the menu.
A new era for L.A.’s best sushi restaurant
To sushi wonks, Morihiro “Mori” Onodera needs no introduction. He arrived in Los Angeles 40 years ago this year, after training in sushi bars for a couple of years in Tokyo. Working at seminal L.A. sushi ground-breakers like Matsuhisa and Katsu, and running Mori Sushi in West Los Angeles for 11 years beginning in 2000, he’s been a guiding hand in defining how Angelenos perceive and enjoy omakase.
After a break from restaurant ownership, he returned with tiny Morihiro in Atwater Village in November 2020. Columnist Jenn Harris and I ranked it number six on the current edition of the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles guide.
Chef Mori Onodera at the former Atwater Village location of his restaurant Morihiro.
(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Onodera has never been afraid of change. Which may be why neither Harris nor I were overly surprised at first when we heard the news sitting together at Onodera’s Atwater omakase counter at the end of August (yes, researching our next edition of the 101 guide, arriving in early December). His hands forming nigiri in a finger ballet, he slipped into casual conversation that he was moving the restaurant. Our eyebrows shot up. Then he smiled mysteriously.
“We will have a bar,” he said. “We are bringing on Han Suk Cho.”
“Whoa, you stole Han from Kato?!” I shouted reflexively. His staff burst out laughing.
Morihiro’s star bartender
Of course, Onodera didn’t “steal” Cho. But it hit me as a shake-up. I’ve written about how Cho and Kato’s bar director Austin Hennelly are the city’s most dynamic cocktail duo. Their spirit-forward versions of a Bee’s Knees or milk punch flowed into the Taiwanese flavors of Jon Yao’s cuisine, and the textures and sharpness of the non-alcoholic drinks they fine-tuned are, it isn’t hyperbole to say, some of the world’s most cutting-edge examples of the genre.
The Elysian era settles Morihiro into a sleek room with neutral-colored walls, spare decor and an outdoor space with a lovely stone garden that’s still a work in progress. Cho is the first person I see, standing at the near end of a long curving black bar. Onodera stands further down, in the room’s center, forming nigiri for three people dining omakase.
Han Suk Cho crafts a drink behind the bar at the new location of Morihiro in Victor Heights.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
“I worked at Kato for 3 ½ years, a long time in one restaurant,” Cho says to me later in a phone interview. “I learned so much about the craft there, and Austin has been a very good shield for me. I could always bounce ideas off of him. But I had to go to really see how much I’ve grown.”
Prior to Kato, Cho focused on NA beverage pairing programs at top-tier restaurants. Last decade she worked briefly at Providence, and then at SingleThread in Sonoma, the luxury restaurant-inn-farm run by chef Kyle Connaughton and farmer Katina Connaughton that merges culinary notions of Japan and California, and then back down the coast at Dave Beran’s now-closed Dialogue in Santa Monica.
In her position as bar director at Morihiro, she’s starting out by concentrating on simplicity — less on distilling the season’s jeweled fruits into complex liquid equations and more on figuring out the exact right mixture of three or four elements, in the best proportions, for a distinctive drink.
“Mori’s Martini,” for instance, combines a California-Japanese mashup of St. George Botanivore, gin made in the Bay Area, with Bermutto (a sake-fortified vermouth), yellow Chartreuse and a finishing scent of cherry blossom. The florals are intricate, yet the drink still has the all-important martini crispness.
Han Suk Cho’s “Melon” cocktail made with Midori, Salers Gentian Apéritif and Cocchi Americano at Morihiro
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
“I think the best part of bartending is that you’re curating the products,” Cho says. “Talking business-wise, if you’re reducing the labor around complicated ingredient prep but still creating a great outcome, that’s a win-win. Some of my more practical thinking has come out of becoming a mother, and I want to encourage other mom bartenders.”
I sense and taste plenty of creativity in her program. My favorite example involves rice, which has been an Onodera obsession for decades. He’s had a hand in developing strains grown in Sacramento and Uruguay, and is currently serving a new hybrid grown in the fields of Iwate, the prefecture in Japan where he was raised.
Cho’s husband, chef Kyle Kawashima, also now works at Morihiro. In the mornings Kawashima mills the rice that Onodera will use for sushi (a rare practice in a sushi restaurant). Cho takes the separate bran from the grains, soaks it for a few hours, strains and grind it finely and then stirs it into a sugar-water solution. The result: a milky, earthy-fragrant rice syrup. She uses to make an unusually silky margarita brightened with yuzu.
With the no-reservations-needed bar comes a substantial a la carte menu of snacks that include spiced edamame and oshinko, appetizers, entrees like cherry-wood smoked chicken and sushi in the form of rolls and single-serving nigiri. Onodera will still be serving his omakases, priced at $400 per person and up, to a handful of customers each night, but the goal is to have a more casual component to the meal where building residents can feel free to drop by.
It’s a pleasure to be able to order a single, perfect piece of nigiri overlaid with kohada — or gizzard shad, the fish I love most from Onodera’s hands — for the price of $11. It’s also fun to see Onodera branch out from sushi. A plate of zabuton wagyu, grilled and splayed in precise square slices, arrives with tempura sweet potato, at once crackling and fluffy, that was cooked for 40 minutes. The kitchen is riffing on a famous recipe by Fumio Kondo, the Tokyo chef whose mastery of tempura parallels the veneration around Jiro Ono.
Tuna tartare with caviar and rice chip on Morihiro’s new a la carte menu.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I ask Onodera over the counter when a restaurant of his last had an a la carte menu. He stares into space and then laughs: “A long time.”
“It used to be,” he says, “that every Japanese restaurant had an a la carte menu, and it was a crazy thing to serve omakase. Now, everyone serves omakase! So we’re seeing what it’s like to have a la carte too.”
When you’ve been making sushi in Los Angeles since 1985, you can be the one to nudge history to repeat itself.
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