This high-end Kansas City restaurant will have just eight seats. It opens this fall

Sushi Kodawari, which has leased space at 2100 Central St., is not open yet — owner Karson Thompson is angling to debut sometime in the fall.

But it is already noteworthy for two reasons. It will be the city’s first stand-alone omakase restaurant — an intimate, fine-dining sushi experience where there is no set menu and each course is determined by the chef. (In Japanese, “omakase” translates roughly to “I leave it up to you.”; “kodawari” means “the pursuit of perfection.”)

It will also likely be Kansas City’s smallest restaurant, and certainly its smallest high-end one. With just an eight-seat counter offering two seatings per night, Sushi Kodawari will max out at 16 diners every evening it is open.

The Star recently spoke to Thompson about omakase, his sushi background, finding his way back to the Midwest and what you can expect when you make a reservation at Kodawari.

Q: How’d you get it in your head that you wanted to open an omakase counter in Kansas City?

A: I’m a very nontraditional entrant into this marketplace. I’m trained as an attorney and have been practicing law for the last 10 years or so in Austin. I was looking for a way to do something that would make people happy to see me for a change.

I had sushi for the first time when I was an undergrad at KU, at a place called Wa on Mass Street. It was probably just a typical California roll. But I’m from a cowtown in western Kansas. I’d never had raw fish before. I just thought it was so amazing, so cool and cosmopolitan. I got really into sushi and eventually took a trip to Japan, where I had my mind absolutely blown in terms of understanding what sushi can be and what that dining experience can be.

In Austin, we were fortunate to have an omakase place that we went to a lot. But then the owner left for Chicago. And I missed that experience. So I started dabbling in preparing sushi at home, getting more and more serious about it. My wife and I always joked that once I got to the point where I was making sushi I’d feel happy paying for, then maybe I could consider a career change. And toward the end of COVID, it felt like I was about there. I took another trip to Japan as kind of a reality check on myself. It was really helpful, and it challenged me, but overall it made me feel good about where I was at. So at that point we decided to move forward.

Why KC?

My wife is from the Kansas City area. We have 4-year-old triplets and were looking to get back closer to family. Also, Kansas City doesn’t really have anybody doing this concept yet. I felt a city this size would have an appetite for it.

Talk about the omakase tradition, and the specific concept you’re planning at Sushi Kodawari.

So, generally speaking, omakase as a restaurant trend is sort of like a prix fixe menu, where you don’t have to order anything and you eat whatever the chef decides is on the menu that day. If you’ve been to a restaurant with a tasting menu, it’s a little bit like that: a fine-dining coursed experience.

The menu will vary based on seasonality. To me, it’s about serving fish when it’s best — which is different from serving fish when it’s freshest. Sometimes fresh is good, but not always. A lot of fish out there benefit from a little time after they’ve been out of the ocean.

I’ll be doing Edomae, which is a style of sushi that originated in Tokyo in the 1800s, in the days before refrigeration, when sushi vendors would set up carts along the docks and sushi was grab-and-go, made with fish that was preserved and cured to keep the fish fresher for a longer period of time. So, we’ll draw on a lot of those classic preservation techniques, but also some more modern ideas as well. For example, we’ll have a dry-aging refrigerator of the kind you’d see at a high-end steakhouse. It ages the fish, gets the moisture out, releases robust flavors, and improves the texture.

Overall, the idea is to do something a little more complex and interesting than the typical rolls-and-bowls sushi you can find around town.

Talk a little more about the differences between what you’re planning and a typical neighborhood sushi spot.

If your only sushi experience is from going to a big retail chain or a local place that’s primarily roll-based, the biggest difference is the focus on nigiri as opposed to rolls. Nigiri is just a slice of fish on a ball of rice. It’s a way of presenting the fish more simply and in a way that highlights what’s great about that particular fish, as opposed to using fish as one ingredient in a larger recipe that pulls flavor from things like mayonnaise and sriracha.

So, in a 15-course omakase meal, you may have 10 pieces of nigiri, most of which are different fish, and it lets you experience a wide spectrum of flavors. And then outside of the nigiri, we will serve some smaller plates with maybe some baked fish, oysters and other shellfish, caviar, fish roe. We’ll probably do chawanmushi, which is a Japanese egg custard served with fresh vegetables and shrimp and presented in a teacup.

But the bulk will be the focus on the fish. For me, as a customer and kind of a sushi snob, the fun of a place like this is coming back throughout the year to see what has transitioned off the menu and what’s back on. Winter means that really fatty mackerel I like might be back, or in the summer you can catch those firefly squids that only pop up a couple months a year.

Will it be just you preparing the dinners, or will you have anybody else helping out?

We’ll probably hire just one other person whose job will primarily be a serving role. I’ve been to a lot of these types of restaurants and seen them run lean on a small staff and also with larger staffs. I think they work better with fewer people.

What’s the space going to look like?

The Crossroads building it’s in is called The Creamery — it was historically a production facility for ice cream, and it’s been renovated by 3D Development, which is the group that’s doing Pennway Point as well as the old Star building. The building is mostly office space for design and architecture firms, but there’s one spot at the bottom that they carved out as a home for a restaurant.

I was told that several restaurants have checked it out and most thought it was too small. For me, it’s a little more space than I need. But it’s such a cool building, and we’ve made a little gallery area up front with some seats where people can hang out before they transition to the counter area for service.

We’re in permit review with the city right now. Once we get that OK, we’ll lock in the construction schedule, and the buildout should move pretty quickly from there since it’s such a small space. Ideally, we’ll open sometime this fall.

What’s it going to cost me to eat there?

We don’t have anything totally nailed down yet on pricing. I’d say the target is to be comparable with other high-end dining experiences downtown.

Reservations only?

Correct. In Tokyo, some places have implemented an even-numbered seating rule to ensure all the seats are filled. So, you can only book for 2 or 4 guests, not 1 or 3. But I’m not sure that will be an issue for us. You’ve got to be a pretty serious diner to book a meal like this just for yourself, and if you are that serious, I definitely want you in my restaurant.

What’s your sense of how ready Kansas City is for an omakase experience like this?

There’s an education component to it, for sure. People will have to get over that initial hurdle, but once you see this in action I think it will catch on. I’ve had so many experiences taking friends and family from small-town Kansas who only know rainbow rolls to places like this. And most of the time it’s so great — you get to sit there and eat and watch their minds explode.