East Nashville’s Noko Surpasses All Expectations

Should you arrive at Noko after dark — increasingly likely as we segue to shorter days and longer nights — the view from the parking lot at the curve where Eastland Avenue meets Porter Road is dramatic. The brick exterior is painted black, and two beams of light illuminate the wall-mounted “NOKO” sign. The graphic logo’s block letters are also on the front door, which offers not a sliver of a glimpse inside, adding a touch of mystery to the tableau.

Should you also know that Noko was named 2023’s Best New Restaurant by Eater Nashville, and if you have failed multiple times — even weeks in advance — to snag a reservation for a party of four later than 5 p.m. but before 9 p.m., your expectations will be high.

Inside the roomy foyer, one wall composed of chopped logs — cut and stacked by founders and partners Jon Murray, Wilson Brannock and executive chef Dung “Junior” Vo — foretells wood fire as a primary cooking source. The website adds “Asian-inspired” and “Asian traditions” to signal its culinary direction, which beyond grill, embers and smoke, includes crudo, Japanese vegetables, crispy and stir-fried rice and two types of bao.

The concept of hospitality differs from culture to culture — ebullient and boisterous (looking at you, Italy), reserved and restrained (as I imagine Copenhagen’s Noma), warm-like-a-biscuit-dripping-with-honey Southern. 

Noko’s style conveys genuine warmth from the first greeting at the host stand, positioned between the entrance and the bar/lounge with a large community table. In the main dining room, visible through a lead-paned glass wall, the service is graceful, polished and attentive. While Chef Vo directs the action in the open kitchen where leaping flames from the grill warm people seated at the chef’s counter, Murray and Brannock perform functional (filling water glasses, removing plates), intentional and interactive table touches in both rooms.

Our first such encounter was with Murray, who, shortly after we were seated in a corner directly under a speaker, came to our table to greet us. One member of our party asked if the music could be turned down — instead, he cordially moved us to a table on the opposite side of the room. While we appreciated the cozy embrace of another corner table — which was indeed quieter than the first — Noko has the same sound issues as countless modern restaurants built out in rooms with polished concrete floors, high unfinished ceilings, wood tables bereft of linens and lots of glass, all of it bouncing about the clatter of dishes and chatter of diners. The Washington Post recently ran — with sound effects and diagrams — a lengthy feature, “Why restaurants are so loud, and what science says we can do about it.”  

To be clear, the noise issue did not diminish the many pleasures of our experience there, nor prevent me from stalking online reservations to return and try the many things we missed the first visit.

One of those items was almost the edamame, which my eyes skipped over in the wood-fired section before landing on dry-rub ribs and the famous platter-size 42-ounce Angus beef Tomahawk. Thankfully, Murray course-corrected us and had a bowl dropped at our table. As God is my witness, it was an edamame epiphany, and I will never again be satisfied with any version but Noko’s — infused with smoke, crisped with char, drizzled with truffle oil and sprinkled with sea salt. Power up the chopsticks on the place-setting triptych that includes an indigo linen napkin neatly folded atop a small ceramic plate.

The cocktails will make you wish for a spot in their R&D lab. Who thought of blending Wagyu fat-washed Angel’s Envy with smoked orange oolong demerara for the Noko Old Fashioned, or that a Rich Girl in a glass is vodka, passionfruit, rice orgeat, tiki bitters and toasted almond? Spirits purists will delight in more than a dozen sakes by the bottle or glass. Three zero-proof cocktails — including a house-made Phony Negroni that had me at Tasmanian pepper berry — bring the party to non-imbibers. 

On the raw side, Noko is known for its crudo — hamachi and bluefin tuna, and both shine (so get both). Six slices of shimmery yellowtail fan across a shallow pool of citrusy yuzu ponzu, each with a dot of bright-red yuzu-chili paste and cilantro microgreens. Bluefin tuna is so rich it holds its own with pickled wasabi, truffle mustard soy, black sesame seeds, crispy slivers of fried onions and a bright-green nest of wakame.

We were torn between the crab fried rice and the tuna crispy rice. “Delicate” is not normally a word that applies to fried rice, but it does here — rice kernels take on a light-brown hue and beefy flavor from Wagyu fat, molded into a disc, dotted with bits of egg yolk and sliced scallion, topped with a small mound of sweet crab meat. Judging by the photos I’ve subsequently seen, the tuna crispy rice is the more interesting of the two, an interpretation of sushi using crisped rice as the platform for chopped raw tuna striped with sweet soy and spicy aioli.

To paraphrase someone I know who described the mainstream appeal of Olive Garden as “not too Italian,” P.F. Chang’s is “not too Chinese,” and nothing on its menu became more mainstream by virtue of its meh-ness than the lettuce wraps. I mean, ground chicken and factory-farmed iceberg lettuce? I would have skipped “lettuce wraps” at Noko had those words not been preceded by “burnt ends” and followed by “beef belly, spiced honey glaze, carrots and bibb lettuce.” The smoked bite-size pieces of beef were as exquisitely fatty as beef’s porcine barnyard buddy. Do not skip the lettuce wraps.

Or the smoked chicken, which redeemed my many disappointments of dry and stringy smoked chicken with plump cuts of skin-on white and dark meat so juicy and tender I’d like to know Vo’s secret. Brine? Marinade? Sous vide? The side of wood-fired bok choy and ramekin of wasabi white sauce made it a happy meal.

It is my job to sample all the desserts so you don’t have to, and cull it down to the one you must have. If you’re gluten-free, that would be the hōjicha (green tea) cake by Daisy Bakes with matcha buttercream and white chocolate crumble. If you gluten, dive into the decadent coconut cake embellished with wood-charred pineapple, toasted coconut, caramel and lime zest. Our server Kylie insisted we try the ube (a purple Asian yam) gelato by Black Box Ice Cream. Bless her for that.

In fact, bless Noko for its mission statement and core values, featured right there on the website landing page — the partners’ commitment to creating a sustainable, happy work environment for their staff, which means health insurance, four-day work weeks and two weeks of paid vacation. Believe me, it shows. They also donate 1 percent of their profits to the Nashville Children’s Alliance.

Noko’s food, beverage, ambiance, aesthetic and service do indeed surpass all expectations raised by Eater’s pick, positive-plus print reports and members of online review sites scrambling for accolades. I couldn’t agree more. But what lingers for me is how Noko leads with its heart. You can’t go wrong with that.