YESS

"Step into chef Junya Yamasaki’s Yess Restaurant for an ambitious, seafood-driven Japanese dining experience. The seats along the cypress bar are especially great, offering full views of the open kitchen. The restaurant relaunched its menu in June 2024 with a renewed focus on wood-fired and charcoal-fueled grill cooking. The reinvented menu features charred vegetables and braised pork belly, plus skewers and a steamed rockfish with Manila clams." - Rebecca Roland

"In late April 2024, Yess closed after about a year of operation to take a break and hit the reset button. After years of construction on the corner of Seventh and Mateo Streets in the Arts District, the Junya Yamasaki-led restaurant spent about two months reevaluating its menu and preparing to open its cafe space toward the rear of the high-ceilinged building." - Matthew Kang

"The front door of Yess is an angled wall of unfinished wood set against a metal frame. It’s gorgeous by entryway standards, but quite bad at being a door. You might stand in front of it wondering if you’re looking at a half-finished construction project, or just locked out, before discovering the recessed two-by-four that swings the slab open. This Japanese tasting menu spot in the Arts District is like its door: beautiful, pretentious, and, most of all, head-scratching. Despite lofty menu descriptions and pristine ingredients, most of what ends up on the plate here falls flat. And while the entrance only causes momentary confusion, an underwhelming meal at Yess will cost you a few hundred dollars, several hours, and probably leave you a little hungry. Between the muted tones, the meditative Music For Plants soundtrack, and the servers who speak softly and wear robes resembling nurse scrubs, the space could be a boutique sanitarium in Ojai. As the staff takes pains to tell you, every ingredient used is of tip-top quality. These include chanterelle mushrooms that still taste like the forest, and local vermilion rockfish that the chef—who used to run a well-regarded Japanese spot in London as well as a great, now-closed food truck—catches himself. photo credit: Yess Restaurant Tragically, those well-sourced plants and sea creatures show up in dishes that are underseasoned, overcooked, or otherwise prepared in ways that don’t do them justice, like the bland water kimchi that tastes closer to water than kimchi, or the flavorless lamb leg “cecina” served with a spinach and beet chip salad straight out of a rec center cooking class. Even the best dishes, which tend to be the simplest, are just a bit off. Sweet spring peas are pleasant in their unseasoned pea-ness, though the lone pair of chopsticks you're handed with the bowl forces you to pick at them one by one like a game of Operation. During our last visit, rockfish sashimi tasted great with fiery habanero yuzu kosho, but when the rockfish showed up again an hour later as a teriyaki grilled fish head on a bed of juniper branches, the meat was rubbery and dry. The lackluster execution and precious chef cliches might be less irksome if it weren't for the cost of the meal, which can get out of hand quickly. Sure, there's the baseline $110 six-course tasting menu (five small dishes and one entree) but sticking to this is like booking a Spirit Airlines seat without upgrades. And even after adding on the supplemental $28 grilled mushrooms and a $20 shaved ice, you’ll still think about pulling over for tacos on the drive home. We get it—Yess is designed to be a fancy restaurant where you're expected to contemplate the peas as much as enjoy them. But if that's your thing, there are better restaurants in LA (or in the Arts District, for that matter) to please those of us who adore avant-garde design, long-winded dish descriptions, and produce so immaculate it cannot be improved upon by human hands. And unlike Yess, they won't have you looking for the door. Food Rundown photo credit: Garrett Snyder Yess Aquatic Water (Kombu Lemonade) Our first sip of this punitively tart, seaweed-infused lemonade was the closest we’ve gotten to a sitcom-style spit take in real life. Despite looking like standard lemonade, it somehow tastes like a wet dog smells. Great for pranking your enemies, not so great for spending $7 on. photo credit: Garrett Snyder Water Kimchi The word “kimchi” might lead you to believe there’s some level of fermentation or flavor happening here, but this amuse-bouche is just unseasoned vegetables and sliced fruit lounging in a cold water bath. photo credit: Garrett Snyder Vermilion Rockfish Sashimi Our favorite dish. The fish is sweet and mild, with a slight chewiness that’s not unpleasant. However, it’s the spicy, fragrant yuzu kosho—colored bright orange by habanero—that steals the show. photo credit: Garrett Snyder Monk's Chirashi The restaurant's signature dish, you'll always find some variation of this on the menu. It comes with assorted fruits, nuts, and raw and dashi-poached vegetables all scattered over vinegared rice. It's fine but forgettable in a clean-out-the-fridge-lunch sort of way. photo credit: Garrett Snyder Grilled Lamb Leg “Cecina” Steak Cecina is usually a dish of salt-cured meat, but without any salt, these amount to thin, tough lamb slices cooked well-done. And the basic salad of unstemmed spinach, apple slices, and beet chips on the side looks like something your parents would text you a picture of while on a cruise. Grilled Rockfish & SoCal Shellfish White Bean Stew We appreciate Yess' dedication to local seafood, but we also feel the need to pour one out for the poor marine life that gave their lives only to show up on this bland, stodgy bean stew topped with overcooked fish. photo credit: Garrett Snyder Sangria Kakigori This $20 dessert arrives as a fluffy, Matterhorn-sized mountain of shaved ice, which looks cool, until your server pours a painfully small amount of what tastes like cran-grape concentrate on top. By the fourth spoonful, the juice is gone and you're shoveling plain snow like a kid clearing driveways in winter. photo credit: Garrett Snyder Cacao, Raisins, & Sweet Potato We saved the real head-scratcher for last. This dessert (also $20) consists of a single roasted sweet potato, a handful of roasted cacao beans, and a handful of raisins. That's it. It made us think of trail mix, but at least trail mix comes pre-mixed." - Garrett Snyder

"Dining at the contemporary Japanese Yess Restaurant is a spiritual experience. Located in Los Angeles’s colorful Arts District in a former bank, the space is large, tall-walled, and minimalist in design and decor. And despite the room’s massive size, dinner is an intimate affair. Diners sit side by side at a long cypress counter as they face chef Junya Yamasaki and his team—dressed in all-white garb like some sort of culinary cult—work their magic in the kitchen, slicing sashimi in silence or gently grilling skewers of freshly foraged mushrooms, twisting and turning until just cooked. The meal is a meditation on restraint, where less is more and ingredients take center stage on the plate. Somehow you’ll leave Yess feeling like a healthier human. —Omar Mamoon" - Omar Mamoon

"Dining at the contemporary Japanese Yess Restaurant is a spiritual experience. Located in Los Angeles’s colorful Arts District in a former bank, the space is large, tall-walled, and minimalist in design and decor. And despite the room’s massive size, dinner is an intimate affair."