Kato

Chef Jon Yao, the 2025 James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: California, is the visionary behind Kato in LA, a Michelin-starred restaurant also named "One to Watch" by the World's 50 Best Restaurants. The tasting menu showcases seasonal ingredients and modern takes on Chinese cuisine using complex cooking techniques. One of its signature dishes, yúdù gēng, uses the entirety of the Dungeness crab — incorporating the fat in the custard, crab meat as a topping, and shells in the fish maw. During preparation, the chefs carefully inspect the crab meat using tweezers and black light flashlights to ensure no tiny pieces of shell are left behind. Other standout dishes include aged lamb saddle in the Zī rán yáng, dry-aged quail in the anchún, and buttery sablefish in the suāncài yú.