I usually plan a little weekend trip for my husband’s birthday, but this year we stayed local. Kato is doing a summer series where chef Jon Yao is teaming up with some of the best LA restaurants to create collaborative tasting menus over 10 weeks this season.
For hubs’ birthday, I booked the Camelia tasting menu. But before we get into that, let’s rewind real quick to 2017, when we first tried Chef Jon’s food in a strip mall in Santa Monica.
The strawberry dessert we had during that meal is something I still think about. It was one of those rare tasting menus that actually sticks with you, memorable and well-executed, which is hard to pull off. Usually, there are so many courses that everything starts to blur together. And if nothing stands out? You just end up full, $300 poorer, and in need of a nap.
Anyway, the Kato | Camelia menu was good. Not amazing, not disappointing – just solidly good. The standout dish for us was the tomato with tofu, cucumber, and eggplant. I’m a tomato girl, and this dish kind of blew us away. I love tomatoes, but I didn’t know they could taste this good. Sweet, savory, tangy (all the Samin Nosrat principles), with some type of jelly I couldn’t quite name and fried… shiso leaves? (Question marks because I’m not sure.) But it was perfection.
The other standout was the Vermillion Rock Cod. I don’t usually like bouillabaisse, but this one was good enough to change my mind. The cod was cooked to delicate perfection and served with sardine toasts (milk bread, I think?) that you could – and should – dip into the bouillabaisse. So unique and delicious.
Here’s the full menu and the other dishes, which were very good but not as impactful as the aforementioned ones. Cocktails were yummy but kind of weak. However, I am happy for Kato’s overall success and growth since we last dined at the strip mall in 2017. Always supportive of fellow Taiwanese.
JULIENNE CARROTS 