Niki Nakayama was born and raised in Los Angeles, graduating from culinary school in Pasadena before beginning her career at the Takao restaurant in Brentwood.
She then spent three years in Japan diving deep into the ingredients, recipes, and techniques of traditional and contemporary Japanese cuisine. Training under chef Masa Sato at Shirakawa-Ya Ryokan, she studied the art of kaiseki: a traditional Japanese approach to preparing multi-course meals that balances tastes, textures, and colors using fresh, seasonal ingredients.
On her return to Los Angeles, Nakayama opened the Azami Sushi Café on Melrose Avenue, where she gradually developed her experience and reputation over the course of eight years, until she felt ready to start offering elaborate chef’s table dinners in the modernized, California-influenced kaiseki style that has become her trademark.
All this was the precursor to the establishment of her restaurant n/naka, which she runs with co-chef and wife Carole Lida. In 2019, n/naka was included in Food and Wine’s 30 Best Restaurants in the World, an achievement quickly followed by the receipt of two Michelin stars. Among numerous other recognitions, Nakayama won the StarChefs Rising Star Chef Award in 2014 and has been a frequent semi-finalist and finalist at the James Beard Awards.
Restaurant(s)
Offering guests a finely crafted dining experience built around chef Nakayama’s modern Californian interpretation of the Japanese kaiseki tradition, n/naka’s tasting menus celebrate the finest Japanese and locally sourced seasonal ingredients, complemented by a connoisseur’s choice of sakes and wines from around the world.
n/naka is the culmination of Nakayama’s culinary journey, a project devoted to creating a seasonal narrative within each meal by applying the philosophy of kaiseki not only to the food but also to every aspect of the restaurant’s design, mood, and service style.
Having featured in the Los Angeles Times’ 101 Best Restaurants every year since it opened in 2013, boasting two Michelin stars, and serving just 22 guests per sitting, n/naka typically has a three-month waiting list for reservations. It has appeared in La Liste’s Top 1000 Restaurants, Food & Wine’s World’s Best Restaurants, Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants, and Eater’s list of America’s 38 Essential Restaurants.
During the pandemic in 2021, Nakayama and her co-chef, business and life partner Carole Lida, opened n/soto in West Adams, Los Angeles. Initially a takeout only restaurant (‘soto’ means ‘outside’ in Japanese), it opened for in-house dining in 2022 as an izakaya-inspired restaurant.
Recipes and dishes
Nakayama’s cooking emphasizes seasonality and balance, showcasing ingredients selected to be at the peak of their freshness in carefully structured sequences of dishes. For example, a raw dish may be followed by a grilled dish, a steamed dish, and then a fried dish, rising and falling from light to heavy and back to light.
The seemingly natural flow and progression of her multi-course tasting menus belies the painstaking work of research and composition that goes into their creation.
To highlight individual dishes in the context of a kaiseki approach—whose entire raison d’être is the balance and harmony of the whole, as opposed to the stand-out quality of individual elements—may seem almost sacrilegious. But to illustrate the breadth of culinary ground covered, one could pick anything from Lobster and Asparagus Chawanmushi or Melon, Tomato, and Apricot Dashi to Miyazaki Wagyu Beef with Arugula Wasabi and Weiser Farm Sunchoke or Cherry Sorbet, Umeshiso, and Elderflower.
In 2015, Nakayama’s life and work was the subject of an episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, which took viewers into the kitchen at n/naka and into the mind of its chef. She later acted as culinary consultant on the 2019 Netflix movie Always Be My Maybe.
