Noko Yaki Announces Opening Date and Menu

After two-and-a-half years of buildouts and name tweaks, Noko Yaki — the newest spot from the owners of Noko and Kase x Noko — is ready to reveal its menu and opening date. Their steakhouse/yakinuku/Korean barbecue spot will open on Friday, Nov. 6, on West End Avenue.

Noko Yaki aims to combine the comfort of American steakhouses and meat-and-potatoes menus with the community of Korean barbecue and Japanese yakiniku. Servers will cook the high-end beef (Kobe beef and Japanese, American and Australian wagyu) on inset grills at the tables. This isn’t a hibachi situation with flying shrimp, or a DIY destination. Noko Yaki owners say they are the only restaurant in Tennessee directly licensed by the Kobe Beef Council, and preparing such quality meat takes skill to cook the delicacy; they want to make sure diners get it exactly right. While they'll cook beef table-side, they'll prepare fish and other dishes in the kitchen. 

First Peek: Noko Yaki

The long-awaited restaurant will offer Kobe beef and tableside grilling

The team likes the “jovial” aspect of cooking table-side and educating customers about their food and wine. Staff is trained to balance that so diners also get some alone time for private conversations, particularly since Noko Yaki will likely be a date-night destination.

The Signature Spread is front and center on the menu. Diners get 2 ounces each of prime filet, prime New York strip, wagyu ribeye and Noko Yaki wagyu galbi, paired with banchan, traditional Korean side dishes cooked in rice. Each meat will be cut in four pieces, says chef-owner Dung "Junior" Vo, so that diners can try it a variety of ways, on its own and dipped in sauces. The menu also offers twists on traditional steakhouse fare, such as onion rings with furikake and hot honey and miso mashed potatoes. The wedge salad — a steakhouse essential — features chili crisp, while the creamed spinach includes shirodashi. It’s plenty of food, but it isn’t the overindulgence sometimes associated with an American steakhouse. (This is not the spot for a 32-ounce tomahawk.)

The shrimp cocktail, served with a Vietnamese cocktail sauce, is a take on what Vo calls the Vietnamese national dipping sauce, made with sugar, lime and fish sauce.

“It’s the baseline of most of everything, and depending on what you’re eating, the water amount, the sugar amount, the lime juice, and the fish sauce amount for intensity changes,” Vo says. “So we took the classic cocktail sauce, and we added the [Vietnamese national dipping] sauce to amplify the horseradish cocktail sauce a little bit, but adding extra levels of umami. It doesn’t look like anything crazy. It looks exactly like another shrimp cocktail, but once you taste it and understand the story behind it, that’s where I feel like the approach will be clear.”

The ownership team — Jon Murray, Vo and Wilson Brannock — built on the foundation of what has made them so successful with their first two Nashville restaurants. (Grabbing a seat at Kase x Noko requires logging onto the reservation site at midnight six weeks in advance, or bartering with someone who has a reservation they can’t use.) That foundation includes seeking out more affordable neighborhood locations so that they can keep menu prices reasonable. The Signature Spread is $62 per person. You can snag a $350 bottle of sake or a $13 glass. There's a full cocktail, beer and wine menu, with spirit-free drinks that are priced significantly lower than the high-octane choices. Vo says you can sit at the bar and order edamame, crudo or the kimchi crab dip with potato chips for a lighter, more affordable meal. A special soft-serve ice cream or sorbet will end each meal.

“Over everything we’ll ever do, we want to make it affordable and approachable,” Vo says. “There’s an ideology behind those two things. Approachability comes in with how we design a menu to make the food familiar to you, so then you’re willing to try something less familiar. We’re taking concepts that are well-known to our guests and putting them together in one place.”

Initially, the dinner-only Noko Yaki will open reservations two weeks in advance at 11 a.m. (Unlike Kase x Noko’s midnight update.) Once they get service down to a science, they’ll make reservations available six weeks in advance. The restaurant seats approximately 150 people. Bar seats will be available for walk-ins. A private dining room is available for groups.

The Noko team is known for the way it treats its staff. Employees work four days a week and have access to therapy, health insurance, annual travel stipends and more. That’s evident in the fact that Noko Yaki received more than 1,000 employment applications. Several employees from Noko are moving to Noko Yaki, including the former assistant general manager — who will be the general manager of Noko Yaki — line cooks and hosts.

Tin Angel, the beloved restaurant that was in this space previously, was open for nearly 26 years, and Murray hopes Noko Yaki will last as long. He’s gotten advice from Rick Bolsom, Tin Angel’s former owner, and hopes to attract neighborhood diners, as Tin Angel did. Noko Yaki is the team’s first project outside of East Nashville. 

“This may sound silly in business terms, but in Japan, their business models are built on 100 years," Murray says. "When they go into business, they want it to be around 100 years from now. While we could charge more and make more money in the short term, let’s have a restaurant that's been here 20, 30 years. What an honor that would be. One of the main ways to do that is for guests to feel like they’re not being taken advantage of.”