A World-Class Omakase in America’s Most Landlocked State

Many of the commercialized strips successful Omaha, a metropolis of astir fractional a cardinal people, person the aerial of a nineties assemblage town, with low-slung blocks of enactment houses punctuated by dive bars and cafés, thrift stores and grounds shops. If the metropolis is known for anything, food-wise, it’s beef; from the mid-nineteenth period to the mid-twentieth, it was a hub of American cattle trading and meatpacking, location to 1 of the largest livestock markets successful the world. The Reuben sandwich whitethorn oregon whitethorn not person been invented successful Omaha (New York lays assertion to it, too), and the city’s iconic restaurants are mostly steak houses, specified arsenic the Drover, a sixty-year-old Midwestern clip capsule with a afloat crockery barroom and whiskey-marinated fillets.

The consciousness that Omaha mightiness beryllium underestimated, adjacent by the radical who unrecorded there, is simply a root of some pridefulness and torment for Utterback. We’d archetypal met successful Los Angeles, a metropolis whose sushi doesn’t peculiarly impressment him, a fewer months anterior to my visit; helium travels wide to conscionable different chefs and invitation them to Omaha to devour and collaborate. “In Omaha—and extracurricular of Omaha, too—there’s this presumption that, due to the fact that thing exists successful a bigger city, it’s inherently better, right?” helium said. He is speedy to constituent retired that helium has an successful with Yamayuki, Tokyo’s apical tuna broker, which “only deals to the Michelin guys,” and that helium began dry-aging fish—a process that enhances some spirit and texture—long earlier it was fashionable. “We’re retired present blazing a trail, and each nighttime idiosyncratic volition go, ‘This is decidedly the champion sushi successful Omaha,’ ” Utterback said. “I don’t adjacent get the state, the region, the surrounding Zip Codes! If we were successful New York, if we were successful L.A., radical wouldn’t say, ‘This is bully for L.A.’ They would say, ‘This is 1 of the champion I’ve ever had.’ We ne'er get that. No one’s ever tried to alteration it.”

Utterback’s parents met connected the Japanese land of Okinawa, wherever his parent was calved and wherever his begetter was stationed with the U.S. Air Force. They settled successful Omaha erstwhile Utterback was ten. Utterback’s mother, Hiroko Ota, took cooking cues from her chap subject wives; the household ate a batch of goulash, cottage cheese, and spaghetti, sometimes successful a modified yakisoba. “She didn’t truly marque stuff. She conscionable benignant of . . . made worldly retired of different stuff,” Utterback recalled. “Nobody was excited astir dinner.” Special occasions, though, were astir ever celebrated astatine Sushi Ichiban, a edifice affiliated with the Unification Church, whose members are known arsenic the Moonies. The Church’s founder, the Korean messiah claimant Sun Myung Moon, was mostly liable for popularizing sushi successful the United States, driven by a content that the seafood manufacture was a divinely inspired solution to satellite hunger.

In his twenties, arsenic Utterback dipped successful and retired of assemblage assemblage and played successful punk bands—it’s not hard, adjacent now, to ideate him successful a mosh pit, with his buzzed hairsbreadth and tattooed biceps—he got a occupation cooking astatine a edifice called Blue Sushi Sake Grill. By 2014, helium was the caput cook of the edifice radical that encompassed Blue and had started to experimentation with omakase arsenic a broadside project. On a travel to Japan a fewer years earlier, helium had eaten astatine Sukiyabashi Jiro, the Tokyo edifice that would beryllium made celebrated by the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” When Utterback told Jiro Ono and his lad that helium was a sushi cook from Nebraska, they laughed astatine him, but besides agreed to his petition for an internship—so agelong arsenic helium moved to Tokyo for astatine slightest 3 years, ideally a decade. Utterback, who’d conscionable gotten joined and bought a location successful Omaha, alternatively devoted himself to learning connected his own, poring implicit books, making regular trips to Japan, and befriending masters of the craft.