December 20, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST
“To me this bite perfectly symbolizes what sushi is supposed to be in America. Sushi is a regional food. It’s supposed to change — in construction, in taste, flavor, terroir and all the ingredients,” Utterback explains, his hair pulled back in a chonmage, the traditional Japanese topknot.
When sushi came to America, “it was supposed to fuse with our culture and we were supposed to use our ingredients. . . . But instead, sushi chefs were so concerned with being Japanese and being authentic, we didn’t let sushi do its thing,” he continues.
“If there was Nebraska sushi,” Utterback adds, “it would be beef.”
His point, as Utterback acknowledges, would be better reinforced if he were serving the beef that he sources from Nebraska and Iowa for Ota’s sister restaurant, Yoshitomo. But for this rarefied meal, the chef has imported richly marbled A5 wagyu — from Hiroshima, Japan.
“It’s going to ruin my whole argument,” he says, laughing.
This is just one paradox among many that define, if not drive, Utterback. He’s serving sushi in a landlocked city that’s home to Omaha Steaks. He has developed a dry-aging program in a mid-grade market where most diners just expect something fresh. He’s frequently described as quiet or introverted yet transforms himself weekly into a chef-performer, quick with a joke or embarrassing anecdote from his youth. He’s a former punk rocker who once survived on day-old sushi during a stop in Las Vegas, now charging $250 a head for dinner. He’s the son of a Japanese mother and American father, “living in the middle of these two worlds.”
Utterback is also self-trained in an industry, especially in Japan, where apprentices routinely surrender 10 years of their lives before they’re allowed to serve sushi. He’s been nominated for a James Beard Award but isn’t sure he ever wants to win one.
He is, in short, a jumble of conflicting ideas, and they add up to one of the most iconoclastic and original sushi experiences in America.
Yukari Kane, a Chicago-based editor, grew up in Japan and the United States and has lived in both countries as an adult. She seeks out the finest sushi counters, and she and her husband now make regular trips to Omaha to dine at Utterback’s. She loves that he’s “just so unabashedly American” in his approach.
“I’m not talking about California rolls. We’re talking about a refined kind of American sushi. I’ve never seen anybody do that,” she adds. “I think the best new sushi right now is in Omaha.”
Utterback, 42, has told this story many times, but when he visited Japan in 2011, he was head chef of a Blue Sushi Sake Grill before it morphed into a multistate chain. In Tokyo, he snagged a reservation at Sukiyabashi Jiro, owned by legend Jiro Ono, now 98, and made famous in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” the documentary released that same year. While at their counter, Utterback says, he told Ono and his son that he was a sushi chef from Omaha.
“They looked at me and just laughed,” Utterback tells diners at Ota, the humiliation now part of his lore. “I died right then and there.”
His mortification didn’t last long. Before he left Japan, Utterback handed a letter to Ono that his mom had written in Japanese, asking if he could train at Jiro. The sushi master originally wanted a 10-year commitment, then settled for three. But even the shorter apprenticeship was too much for Utterback, who didn’t want to uproot his life. He had just married his longtime girlfriend, Leah Hartman.
That decision set a course for Utterback’s career that would separate him from the likes of chef Daisuke Nakazawa, the former Jiro apprentice whose exquisite work at Sushi Nakazawa in New York and Washington, D.C., will be, in some ways, forever linked to his mentor.
“In Japan, it’s really a mentor system. It is very important to see who is the mentor and what kind of technique is the sushi chef using,” says Hanyin Chang, a Tokyo-based businessman who attended an omakase pop-up that Utterback hosted this fall at Hakkoku in the Ginza district. But Utterback is “not locked in. . . He can think outside of the box. I think that’s the most interesting part.”
Utterback’s education in Tokyo-style sushi has been unorthodox, if not completely nuts. He has taught himself just enough Japanese so that on annual trips to Tokyo, he could hit bookstores and say, “I’m looking for a Japanese sushi book. Does it exist?” He has amassed a formidable collection, many written in Japanese, which he can’t read, but he can examine the photos or, when his mother was still alive, ask her to translate.
Just as important, he has frequented as many omakase counters as he could afford. He’s watched countless videos and documentaries, searching for clues on how chefs season rice, cut fish or prepare tamago. He has even examined the backgrounds in videos to see what equipment they’re using. He has memorized the names, faces and techniques of the world’s greatest sushi chefs as if he were regurgitating stats from the back of baseball cards. He geeks out whenever he meets one.
Looking to transform knowledge into action, Utterback started hosting occasional omakase dinners at Blue Sushi, whose “Itchy Salmon,” “Crunchy Blue” and other specialty rolls and nigiri have made the restaurants an attraction. One of the regular customers was Rob Rutar, a friend and fellow musician in their on-again, off-again band, Carson City Heat. Utterback served Rutar baby octopus one night. It was the first time he had tried it.
“I should be creeped out about it, and I’m not. It’s delicious,” Rutar recalls thinking. “I was just like, ‘This guy is magic.’”
Rutar became such a fan that he made the chef promise to call him if he ever decided to open his own restaurant. Rutar wanted to invest.
That call arrived in 2017 when Utterback split from Blue Sushi to lay the groundwork for Yoshitomo. Rutar took out a loan on the house that his parents had left him when they died. Utterback sold his guitars and maxed out a handful of credit cards, and between them, they cobbled together about $150,000. They signed a lease on a former Subway shop where customers once had to ring a bell to enter because crime was so bad in the Benson neighborhood.
“He had to work really hard to get the smell of the Subway bread out of the space,” recalls Sarah Baker Hansen, who was food critic at the Omaha World-Herald when Yoshitomo opened in October 2017.
Rutar remembers talking to Utterback about the opening-day menu. Rutar wanted to make sure it included miso soup and California rolls to help ease diners into what could be a challenging meal. Utterback shot them down.
“Dave said, ‘We’re going to do really cool stuff and you’re going to have to trust me,’” Rutar recalls. “I was like, ‘Well I guess at this point, I’m going to have to trust you.’”
Hartman, Utterback’s wife, remembers the fear leading up to the debut. They had had their first child in 2015 and had bought a house just months before her husband decided to go all-in on his restaurant. “We had a very real talk about having to stay with my parents” in Iowa if Yoshitomo failed, she remembers.
Creating the type of sushi restaurant he wanted was not easy in Omaha. Utterback had to find cooks willing to learn his style. He sometimes had to create supply lines where none previously existed. Over the years, he has developed relationships with some of the most prestigious fish vendors in the world, including U.S. Sakasyu (which imports from the famous Tsukiji market in Tokyo), Luxe Seafood and even, on occasion, the Yamayuki Group (whose president, Yukitaka Yamaguchi, is known as the “king of tuna,” though Utterback sometimes upgrades his title to “the god of tuna”).
One of his vendors is Martinez Produce and Seafood, whose Japanese fish buyer, Mika Ishikawa, says she is incredibly picky about the chefs she sells to. But she believed in Utterback enough not just to sell to him, but to establish a new distribution channel in Omaha.
“I like his passion,” Ishikawa says. “He has taste. He’s not like top, top, top grade, but he’s going to be. He’s really good.”
Yoshitomo opened to immediate praise. “The best chefs rely on tradition, yet still create truly original food. Utterback is doing that at Yoshitomo,” Baker Hansen wrote for the World-Herald in 2018.
Kane, the Chicago editor, remembers one of the first courses she ever had there: a lobe of sea urchin, whose creamy texture and briny flavor can be off-putting to newcomers. But the sea urchin was warm, which tempered the flavor; instead of rice, the lobe was placed atop a rectangle of sourdough bread soaked in brown butter and soy sauce, then toasted. Kane and her husband were blown away.
“We just thought it was a brilliant way to start. It’s the Midwest. It’s Omaha,” she remembers. “He’s signaling that it’s a challenging meal, and yet he’s made it in the most enjoyable way possible.”
Utterback didn’t seem destined for a life in sushi, or even restaurants. He was born on Robins Air Force Base near Warner Robins, Ga. His dad, Terry, is an Iowa native who was senior master sergeant, working in corrosion control. His late mom, Hiroko Ota, was a homemaker, born in Kumejima, Japan. The family, including a younger sister, Joy, moved around a lot. Money was tight, so they rarely dined in restaurants.
In 1991, when Utterback was 10, the family moved from Spain to Bellevue, Neb., just outside Omaha, and into a neighborhood reserved for Air Force families, every home some shade of khaki. Life was a multicultural experience: Families could trace their ancestry to many other parts of the globe. Utterback doesn’t remember contemplating his Japanese roots until he attended Bellevue West, a majority White high school where he would soon become known as “Asian Dave.”
“Oh, I’m different,” he says he realized. “I’m, like, not one of you guys.”
Utterback played varsity soccer but he was never part of the sports clique. He preferred the privacy of fantasy novels and video games. He and some friends started playing punk music, at a time in the 1990s when the indie music scene was flourishing in Omaha. His first band, the Losers, played shows in their underwear, Utterback remembers, like a Midwestern version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were known to perform wearing only socks over their privates.
Over a meal at the family’s favorite Japanese restaurant, which can trace its roots to a place Utterback and his mom frequented years ago, the chef’s wife is thrown into a mini-tailspin over the underwear anecdote. “It’s hard for me to imagine you doing that,” Hartman says.
“But when your friends are doing it too, then, sure, you can do it,” Utterback says. There’s a photo of the infamous gigs, he adds, “but I’m not sharing it.”
Utterback’s rebelliousness can still be felt in his restaurants, beyond his unwillingness to offer miso soup or soy sauce at the table. During a recent visit, he was considering taking edamame off his menu. “It’s one of the last bastions of sushi expectations,” he said to his culinary team, including Matthew Kelly, Mandy Kennick and Dominic Gurciullo.
He goes against expectations in other ways: His seasoned sushi rice for Ota, for example, contains no sugar, often used by chefs to cater to American palates. (His rice is seasoned with four kinds of vinegar, including one aged 20 years, which he calls the “Pappy Van Winkle” of vinegars.) The chef also dry-ages fish, as a way not just to alter the texture or flavor, but to hold premium products over multiple days between omakase dinners. At Koji, his casual izakaya restaurant, Utterback even serves what he used to call a “ranza.” It’s a bao-based version of a runza, a stuffed pocket popular in the Midwest.
Not all of these things have gone over well. Runza, the Lincoln, Neb.-based chain that specializes in the pocket, sent Utterback a cease-and-desist letter in July, which convinced him to change the name to “bunzai.” Utterback’s fish-aging program draws occasional shade, too. Otto Phan, the chef who runs the four-star Kyoten in Chicago, dismisses fish-aging as a gimmick. “I do find it insincere when the buzz line is how long it’s aged versus the quality of the fish,” says Phan.
Then again, at the time of our interview, Phan had never eaten Utterback’s food, which underscores another issue: Yoshitomo and Ota are well off the beaten path, far from the cities often associated with America’s best sushi counters. After Baker Hansen left the World-Herald in 2019, Omaha doesn’t have a full-time food critic to help draw attention to its finest chefs and restaurants.
Utterback knows he could relocate, but he wants to stay in Omaha. His house has a small, kidney-shaped swimming pool for their children: Koji, 8, and Eisley, 4. He has short commutes to his restaurants and even to the airport, where he picks up fish from Japan. He gets family time nearly every morning and evening. Life is good.
“The quality of life that I have here, I don’t think I can have anywhere else,” he says.
Still, Utterback likes to see where he stands among his peers, so he continues to host pop-ups, like the one in Tokyo this fall. One diner was Akari Ehashi, who works in the Japanese fish industry with his father. They sell sea urchin to Utterback and wanted to sample his food. “We’ve had experiences trying many sushi and seafood” counters, Ehashi emailed. “Yet we have to say David’s omakase was one of the best omakase we’ve ever had.”
Eight of the 17 courses were fish dry-aged in Omaha and brought to Tokyo.
Even though Utterback pushes for success, he’s a little afraid of it. What if he should win a Beard Award, and not just get nominated like he did this year in the Best Chef: Midwest category?
“Everyone wants to win an award, but there was a part of me that was certainly relieved that I didn’t because my life didn’t have to change,” Utterback says. “I’m very, very happy right now. If something comes along and wrecks that, even if it’s good, it’s kind of scary.”
