ARTS DISTRICT’S LAUDED YESS RESTAURANT HITS THE RESET BUTTON AFTER A YEAR
In late April 2024, Yess closed after about a year of operation to take a break and hit the reset button. After years of construction on the corner of Seventh and Mateo Streets in Arts District, the Junya Yamasaki-led restaurant spent about two months to evaluate its menu and prepare for the opening of its cafe space toward the rear of the high-ceilinged space.
On June 27, Yess reopened with a fully a la carte menu tightened to feature the chef’s almost experimental and artful approach to “progressive” Japanese cuisine. Through the past year, Yess received a slew of praise from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Esquire, but others like the Infatuation haven’t been quite as positive. Throughout, writers made keen observations of the distinct temple-like service featuring white-clad service staff, with Conde Nast Traveler saying, “The meal is a meditation on restraint, where less is more and ingredients take center stage on the plate. Somehow you’ll leave Yess feeling like a healthier human.”
Yamasaki came to Los Angeles via London, where he had operated Koya noodle bar, and opened Yess Aquatic, a seafood-oriented Japanese-inflected food truck. In April 2023, he opened Yess in a former bank building with delicate, locally sourced seafood and grilled proteins. Initially, the restaurant featured an a la carte menu before transitioning to tasting menus in early 2024.
The new menu at Yess still features a sashimi of the day, smoked steelhead trout with roasted walnuts, and braised pork belly kakuni with grapefruit and mustard. Overall, the dishes feel plucked off an upscale izakaya menu, from grilled shishito, silken tofu with salsa macha, and eggplant fritters, all priced under $20. Entrees include a lobster katsu sando, grilled rockfish prepared shinkei-jime-style (a method in which the spinal cord is removed to reduce rigor mortis) with sweet pepper escabeche, and grilled pasture-raised tenderloin with fresh wasabi.
Some dishes, like temaki or rice balls, cost under $15, while others, like box crab salad with Weiser Farm potatoes, can be purchased for up to $38. This gives the new menu the versatility of a neighborhood restaurant with some opportunities to make the experience more of a special occasion. That accessibility was key for Yamasaki, seeing that prospective customers might’ve been swayed by the higher entry point of a tasting menu.
For dessert, two kinds of kakigori come into play, one topped with coffee-whiskey syrup and dates, the other featuring citrus-enzyme syrup with almond. The final elemental dish, roast sweet potato, raisins, and cacao, which completed the tasting menu, is no longer there. However, it could return in an all-new kaiseki-inspired omakase reserved for 10 seats that will come online later this year. Yess’s previously announced adjacent cafe and wine bar, led by Giles Clark, should open by the fourth quarter or early 2025.
Yess is open Wednesday to Sunday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at 2001 E. Seventh Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90021. Reservations are accepted on Resy.
