Arts District’s Lauded Yess Restaurant Hits the Reset Button After a Year

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.

On June 27, Yess reopened with an a la carte menu tightened to feature the chef’s experimental and artful approach to “progressive” Japanese cuisine. Over the last year, the restaurant received a slew of praise from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Esquire, but others, like the Infatuation, haven’t been quite as impressed. Food writers made keen observations about the distinct temple-like service featuring white-clad service staff, with Conde Nast Traveler noting the meal as “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.”

Yamasaki came to Los Angeles via London, where he had operated Koya noodle bar, and opened Yess Aquatic, a seafood-oriented Japanese-inflected food truck. In April 2023, he opened Yess in a former bank building with delicate, locally sourced seafood and grilled proteins. Initially, the restaurant featured an a la carte menu before transitioning to tasting menus in early 2024.

The new menu at Yess still features a sashimi of the day, smoked steelhead trout with roasted walnuts, and braised pork belly kakuni with grapefruit and mustard. Overall, the dishes feel plucked from an upscale izakaya, with grilled shishito peppers, silken tofu with salsa macha, and eggplant fritters, all priced under $20. Entrees include a lobster katsu sando, grilled rockfish prepared shinkei-jime-style (a method in which the spinal cord is removed to reduce rigor mortis) with sweet pepper escabeche, and grilled pasture-raised tenderloin with fresh wasabi.

Some dishes, like temaki or rice balls, cost under $15, while others, like box crab salad with Weiser Farm potatoes, can be had for up to $38. This gives the new menu the versatility of a neighborhood restaurant with some opportunities to shape the experience for more of a special occasion. That accessibility was key for Yamasaki, seeing that prospective customers might’ve been swayed by the higher entry point of a tasting menu.

For dessert, two kinds of kakigori come into play, one topped with coffee-whiskey syrup and dates, the other featuring citrus-enzyme syrup with almond. The final elemental dish, roast sweet potato, raisins, and cacao, which completed the tasting menu, is no longer there. However, it could return in an all-new kaiseki-inspired omakase reserved for 10 seats that will come later this year. Yess’s previously announced adjacent cafe and wine bar, led by Giles Clark, should open by late 2024 or early 2025.

Yess is open Wednesday to Sunday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at 2001 E. Seventh Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90021. Reservations are accepted on Resy.

Yana Sheptovetskaya

Yana Sheptovetskaya

Yess

Yana Sheptovetskaya