Leina Horii and Brian Lea at Kisser
We’ve known since it opened in 2023 that East Nashville favorite Kisser was an extremely good restaurant, and now the national culinary press has officially recognized the amazing work that chef-owners Leina Horii and Brian Lea have been doing over at 747 Douglas Ave. Despite operating only Friday through Monday, the cozy lunch-only spot has already made a major impact in the local restaurant scene with its precise takes on Japanese comfort food. And if you thought it was tough to get in before, wait until you hear this!
On consecutive days this week, Kisser was named among Bon Appétit's 20 Best New Restaurants of 2024, and Lea and Horii were named to Food & Wine Magazine’s class of Best New Chefs of 2024! Considering the star-studded roster that the husband-and-wife team has worked with — including chefs like Charlie Palmer, José Andrés, Sean Brock, Ludo Lefebvre, Ryan Poli and Josh Habiger — I might quibble with the “new chefs” designation, but we’ll certainly celebrate the acclaim with them.
Bon Appétit praises Kisser’s “concise menu [that] features traditional dishes like onigiri and udon while leaving plenty of room for improvisation.” Food & Wine included just a dozen new chefs in this year’s class of outstanding newcomers to the national scene, and recognized Lea and Horii for the fact that “every dish is the product of great care and technical finesse, yet it all feels comforting, subtly luxurious, and never flashy. The sunny, lunch-only café would be a fantastic place to linger all afternoon.” The magazine also acknowledges the understandable difficulty of navigating the wait list, “but damn it, all of Nashville is waiting for your table.”
The couple is best-known for their nomadic Slow Burn restaurant series
These accomplishments are even more remarkable when taken within the context of the rest of the Strategic Hospitality family of restaurants, to which Kisser belongs. Kisser joins The Catbird Seat (2012), Bastion (2017) and Henrietta Red (2012) as members of the Best New Restaurants lists. This is a testament to not only the talent of the chefs and the quality of their restaurants, but also to Strategic Hospitality founders Benjamin and Max Goldberg’s strategy to create new restaurants that are the sorts of places where they would like to go in the moment.
Would The Catbird Seat win the same award if it opened in 2024? Possibly not in this age, when theatrical chef tables aren’t the novelty that they were a decade ago, especially in the culinary hinterlands like Nashville. Also admirable is that The Catbird Seat has managed to keep its standards sky-high and the cuisine interesting through several generations of chefs and chef teams throughout the years. (Personally, I think it is just as exciting as it was back in 2024 and can’t wait for the latest iteration under the direction of Andy Doubrava and Tiffani Ortiz.)
Strategic Hospitality also has a track history of placing its chefs on the Food & Wine list, with Bastion’s Josh Habiger gaining that acclaim along with Erik Anderson for their efforts opening Catbird in 2012 and Julia Sullivan joining the Best New Chef class of 2018 after opening Henrietta Red.
So Lea and Horii are in very good company. Congratulations to all involved!
