How Jesse Ito Built a Sushi Dynasty

Jesse Ito at Royal Sushi & Izakaya / Photograph by Justin James Muir

When Jesse Ito turned 15, his dad, Massaharu, took him to Vetri for his birthday.

It was a big deal. Well, dinner at Vetri is always a big deal because Marc Vetri’s massive, multicourse prix fixe is epic, overwhelming, expensive — plate after plate of antipasti, carpaccio, citrus salad, almond tortellini, rabbit agnolotti with black truffle, and dessert trays. Two and a half hours at the table, easy.

But it was also important because Jesse’s parents, Massaharu and Yeonghui, were recently divorced. Jesse was staying with his mom, and, as a way to see his dad more, he’d started working at Fuji in Cinnaminson, the restaurant they both still owned. The restaurant he’d grown up in.

Nothing about the situation was easy — not for Jesse, not for his parents. But work was work. Massaharu had trained as a sushi chef in Japan. He’d been brought to the U.S. to help open Sagami, the revered Collingswood Japanese restaurant, then opened Fuji in 1979. He and Yeonghui worked every day — him at the sushi bar, her running the floor. When Jesse was born, Fuji was already 10 years old; he never knew a moment in his life without it.

Still, things fall apart. Life happens. And even though Jesse’s mom and dad had recently split, they still had to work together every day. And Jesse was right there with them, through it all. And that night at Vetri, he brought all of that to the table with him. But what he remembers is the dinner. The smooth progression of plates. The small, beautiful room and the attention of the staff.

Recently, at Royal Sushi & Izakaya, where Jesse now serves a highly personal, ever-changing omakase menu to just a handful of customers each night, Marc Vetri showed up for dinner with his son, Mario, who was turning 15.

“This,” Jesse says to me. “This is one of the most rewarding things I do.” And he means seeing Marc, seeing Mario. Not because it’s Big-Time Chef Marc Vetri sitting at his sushi bar (he has Big-Time Whatevers coming in all the time), but because of the synchronicity of it. The generational regulars. Guests he sees again and again over the years.

He tells me, “There are people who’ve come to omakase on first dates. Then I see them get married. Maybe they disappear for a few months because someone is pregnant. Then they come back and they have a kid. It’s fucking mind-boggling to me. And it makes me feel old, but it’s also incredible. It shows how fast time goes.”

He tells me about the couple who fly in from San Francisco every three months. They eat everywhere, but Royal is always their first stop. He sees some of his regulars more often than he sees friends. He has been there for some of the most important moments of their lives.

A restaurant, Jesse says — any restaurant, really, but Royal in particular, and the Royal omakase in particular-particular — is, by its nature, a place where intimate moments are shared. First dates, anniversaries, wakes, birthdays. Jesse’s dinner with his dad, Marc Vetri’s dinner with his son — they’re part of a cycle. A marking of days. The imprinting of memories.

Jesse’s omakase at Royal seats eight customers, twice a night. Just 16 people per night, five nights a week. It wasn’t always this way, but that’s how it is now. Because things fall apart. Life happens. Dinner will run you $300, base price. It is 17 courses. Every seat is booked months in advance. It is, without a doubt, the hardest reservation in the city to get. The waiting list is more than a thousand names long.

Goals

Fuji in the ’80s / Photograph courtesy of Jesse Ito

“I hated this when I was a kid. I hated it.”

Jesse is talking about Fuji. Not Fuji the place, but working there, doing dishes and cleaning squid. Cooking. Fuji is more than just a restaurant to him, it’s an era. Temporal as much as physical. It is a fixed point in both place and time, and, really, what he’s talking about is time.

“It took away … my youth,” he says. “I didn’t get to play sports. I didn’t get to go to prom. I didn’t date. I was working. Always working. I didn’t get to hang out with my friends on the weekends because it’s the weekend, right? And I had to work. I had to work.”

In the hours we spend on the phone, we’ll talk about lots of things. Instagram, the fish business, addiction and sobriety, Japan, Friendly’s, his mom, his dad, the pandemic. Mostly, we talk about marketing (because Jesse loves to talk about marketing), and when we’re not talking about that, we’re just bullshitting about The Life, which is how restaurant professionals refer to both the hours they spend in restaurants and those they spend outside, merely thinking (worrying, talking, bitching, discussing, debating, obsessing) about them. But this is one of the first things he says to me. This is where we start.

What he wants me to understand is that this? The beautiful, unmarked space on 2nd Street in Queen Village with its red lantern and blue door; the packed bar and pressed tin ceiling, silent loops of anime projected on old bricks and a cloistered sushi bar in back; the fame and awards (Jesse is an eight-time James Beard Award nominee without a win yet, the Bradley Cooper of the food world); flat seating the entire izakaya (68 seats) at 5 every Friday night and the lines at Royal that stretch down the block? This wasn’t where he thought he’d end up. Fuji had been his entire childhood. Homework in the kitchen. Video games in his dad’s office. At 14, he was washing dishes and making dessert. At 15, he started training at the sushi bar. And that was that. What he needs me to understand is that he didn’t choose this.

“No,” Jesse says. “That’s not right.”

“What?”

“That’s not right.”

“Which part?”

“The choice was always there. I could’ve gone a different path, but I would’ve left my parents hanging.”

“And you couldn’t do that.”

“No. I mean, I was good with my hands. I was good at cutting things, forming things. And Fuji, it was a critical success, but financially, there were problems. And when the restaurant moved to Haddonfield, there was this huge loan …”

“So it made sense, you working there?”

“Yeah.”

“But you hated it.”

“Yes.”

“Got it.”

“But I was good at it, too. Like, I could do it. I could help. There were moments I wanted to leave — some really hard moments personally, financially — but I couldn’t turn my back on my parents. How could I do that?”

I ask him if there was ever anything else he wanted to be. Doctor? Lawyer? Rock star? And he really can’t answer. He tells me a photographer, maybe. Or a carpenter. A professional problem-solver. But he doesn’t really know. He’s never been anything other than what he is. He’s 36 years old, and for 22 of those years (not counting six months spent rolling crepes while Fuji was moving to Haddonfield), he’s worked at only two restaurants. Do you know how rare that is? To be at this level, to have achieved this kind of success and this kind of recognition, with a résumé shorter than your average high schooler’s?

Later, he explains to me that his entire life can be reduced to two goals — primary drives that inform every other decision he makes:

Take care of his parents.

Fulfill his own ambitions.

Not one, then the other. Not one more than the other. But both things at the same time, in balance. Everything he does is seen through that lens.

So sure, saying he didn’t have a choice isn’t fair. He absolutely had a choice. He could’ve just turned his back and walked away, found some kind of different life. But he didn’t. He chose this from two possible options, one of which, to him, was right and the other inconceivable.

Food Is a Door

Caviar toro at Royal / Photograph by Justin James Muir

Jesse and I talk for a while. Hours at a time, here and there, mostly before service, before prep. He is a creature of strict and regimented scheduling, of systems designed and stress-tested over years of repetition. Efficiency is a major concern for him. Speed. He has this idea — learned young, burned in hard over decades — that every day he has to be a little faster than he was the day before. If cutting vegetables took 15 minutes yesterday, it should take him 14 minutes, 59 seconds today. Tomorrow, 58. Because today he should be better than yesterday. And tomorrow, better still.

We talk about washing dishes and how, as a dishwasher, the first thing you learn is time management. Wreathed in steam, feet squeaking on the nonskids, and faced with an unending flow of dish tubs, you get to understand organization, efficiency, and conservation of movement on a very personal level.

“That’s why, if you were a good dishwasher, you can be a great sushi chef,” Jesse insists. Because both things are about processes and time.

We talk about the omakase — at first metaphorically, then very specifically. Jesse spends mornings at the gym, thinking about the restaurant. On the treadmill, he designs playlists. Music for the izakaya: indie, funk and soul, old-school hip-hop. The music is important in the same way the lighting is important and the chairs are important and the plates are important.

To him, the food is just another piece of this. And he considers it the same way he considers everything else: peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows. “A menu is a playlist,” he says. “An omakase is a playlist. I think of it like I’m building an album.” Chawan-mushi to start — egg custard with hairy crab, nameko mushrooms, and a clarified fish broth. Kanpachi with vinegar dashi sauce. All the Good Things is his first real banger: red shrimp, scallop, sea urchin, salmon roe, and mizuna, with buttermilk sauce. And then he cranks it even higher with kamatoro — a piece of dry-aged fatty tuna collar marinated in soy and garlic, served with sea urchin roe and scallion — before cooling it down again. Hotate uni with seaweed butter. A single Kumamoto oyster with toro tartare. Kinmedai nigiri.

“Food is a door,” he explains. It’s how you approach the table. It’s the first thing, the most important thing, and also the least important thing. You have to get the food right or nothing else that we’re talking about matters. Not the music. Not the chairs. None of it.

But Jesse has spent so long getting the food right that he barely has to think about it now. Cutting fish, doing prep, forming the sushi? There’s no motion he hasn’t made 10,000 times. “That’s almost robotic,” he says. “It’s kinda zen.” It takes a long time to be so comfortable making sushi. “But once the food is there, a restaurant becomes about so much more.”

Mirrors on the Ceiling

Jesse Ito and his father, Massaharu, at the Royal bar in 2016 / Photograph courtesy of Jesse Ito

Fuji was an unusual place. It was unique in its moment, beloved. A cult favorite of a certain class of well-heeled restaurant aficionado who would come from New York or Center City just to eat at a sushi bar in New Jersey. The same people who, today, think nothing of flying into Philly from San Francisco for an omakase a few times a year.

“My dad was like me,” Jesse explains. “Pre-Instagram. So he never quite blew up. But you’d be driving down Route 130, and there’s Fuji. Parking lot loaded with nice-ass cars.” And next to it, a kind of classic no-tell motel. “The kind that advertised the mirrors on the ceiling. That’s what always struck me.”

So Fuji had a following. It was solvent, but never really successful. There wasn’t ever enough time, enough money, enough help. It was a classic family restaurant situation: a small BYO that had plateaued at a level just beneath what was required to expand, price-capped into the middle tier of local restaurants by location and bias — not inexpensive enough to appeal to those looking for a cheap night out, but not pricey enough to bank on big spenders racking up thousand-dollar tabs. Plus, with no bar, it didn’t even have the safety net of being able to upsell a few ounces of rum and pineapple juice just because it had a little paper umbrella in it.

Still, Massaharu and Yeonghui worked hard. They were there every day, open to close.

“Mom was the kindest person I’ve ever known,” Jesse tells me. “She had the biggest heart. But working there, it wasn’t always great for her. And I saw all of that. How people treated her? That shaped how we do service at Royal. That’s why we ban customers. We have a list.” It’s not for little things — for getting loud or being a shitty tipper. But if you abuse a member of the staff? That’s it. You’re done. Forever.

Things I Learned During the Apocalypse (Part 1)

Red shrimp, scallop, sea urchin, salmon roe, and mizuna, with buttermilk sauce / Photograph by Justin James Muir

Education was important in Jesse’s family. In high school, he was a solid student who never had to study. He’d go to school, come to Fuji, work a shift, sleep, repeat. On weekends, he worked. Vacations? Worked. He washed dishes, cut vegetables, cleaned fish. He pulled the beaks and eyes out of firefly squid.

Jesse went to Rutgers in Camden at 18 to study marketing. He didn’t see the point. He knew how his life was going to go. But he’d go to classes, work in between, work at night. He thought it was going to be like high school, and high school had been easy for him.

This was different.

His freshman year, he didn’t study and almost flunked out, so he buckled down. He learned how to study, how to focus on something that wasn’t cutting vegetables or cleaning squid. In his universe, problems were solved with hard work, and if he thought he was already working as hard as he could, he was about to learn that he could work even harder.

In December of 2007, the Great Recession began — a result of the global financial crisis and the collapse of the U.S. housing market. Over in New Jersey, Jesse is 18 years old. Working at his parents’ restaurant. In his first year as a marketing major. Not in great shape.

“From, I don’t know, like 19 to maybe 21? I don’t remember anything,” Jesse tells me. Nothing that wasn’t school, anyway. Or work. Because from 19 to 21? That’s 2008 to 2010. That’s a period in which the American GDP fell 4.3 percent — the largest decline since the end of World War II. Home prices tanked. Unemployment hit 10 percent. The stock market crashed.

For the restaurant industry, the global financial crisis was absolute murder because people who are worried about losing their houses don’t go out to eat. Jesse tells me that there were days when Fuji’s lunch and dinner sales would total less than $1,000. When he would look out in the dining room and it would be empty.

So Jesse dug in. Piece by piece, he started taking responsibility for Fuji. He shrank the menu and reformatted it so it was easier to understand. He redid the website. He started writing a newsletter and took over the marketing. During the day, he would be at school, learning about economic theory and the four P’s of successful marketing, and at night he would bring those lessons back to Fuji and apply them in real time. It was like one enormous class project, played for the highest possible stakes.

And the worst part about all of it? Fuji was more or less perfectly positioned to fail during a crisis. Jesse and I spend a lot of time talking about this: how, on one end of the restaurant spectrum, you have cheap, easily accessible family restaurants that have razor-thin profit margins but do huge volume. On the other, there are the expensive fine-dining restaurants that do far less business but have larger margins. Fuji was neither of those things. It didn’t have the margins or the volume. It sat squarely in the middle of the spectrum.

“And in a crisis, everything in the middle gets fucked,” Jesse says. Which, I gotta say, is just about as succinct a summation of market theory as I have ever heard.

Apples

Jesse Ito preparing sushi rice / Photograph by Justin James Muir

Fuji survived the Great Recession. I ask Jesse if he thinks what he did helped, and he says yeah, it did. He was watching the numbers. He saw return visits ticking up with email promotions and newsletter marketing. He saw guest counts rise.

“And look,” he says, “my mom always reminds me, ‘We wouldn’t have made it through if you weren’t there.’”

Which is nice, sure. It’s a really sweet thing for her to say. But there was a problem: Jesse could see the future now.

There’s an inherent brutality to numbers if you look at them honestly. They exist to show you hard facts, with no regard for your feelings, your needs, your desires. You sit down at a table and there are three apples in front of you. You might want a fourth apple. You might think you deserve a fourth apple. You might say that you’ve worked hard, sacrificed, made hard choices, and four apples are owed to you because that guy at the next table? He has seven apples. And that one over there has a thousand.

Numbers don’t care. Numbers say, There are three apples. Deal with it. And at that point, Jesse knew that even with the worst of the recession in the rearview and customers coming back, he had three apples in front of him. And no more were coming.

“I looked around and I only saw me and my parents working every day for the rest of our lives,” he says. His mom and his dad would grow old at Fuji. He would grow old at Fuji. He’d be 80, still behind the same bar, still serving the same fish. All they were doing was treading water. Nothing would ever change. Unless …

At this point, Jesse was getting pretty good behind the bar. He’d spent his entire life learning from a master sushi chef, and Fuji remained a place where people who really knew sushi would come to see Massaharu and his son work. But finished with school now and committing himself fully to Fuji, he was quickly coming to realize that it was a dead end more than just financially.

“If I’d stayed at Fuji, I would’ve never been able to fill my dad’s shoes,” he admits.

So he needed something else. Something new. Something that was his. He tells me that by the time he was 23, he already had three different investors or groups trying to get him to open a restaurant of his own. He won’t say who they were, but it also doesn’t really matter because Jesse Ito — with precisely one restaurant on his résumé, the only real job he’d ever had (crepes not included) — went with Stephen Simons and David Frank, the partners behind Cantina Los Caballitos, Dos Segundos, the Khyber, and Royal Tavern. They had a building, a former Italian restaurant at 2nd and Fulton in Queen Village, that they were looking to remake into something different. They’d already been through at least one chef, maybe two. But with Jesse, they’d found their guy.

As for Jesse, he’d found his way out. The plan was to throw in with Stephen and David, get an ownership stake for himself and his dad in the new restaurant, let his mom retire. But that was going to take money, and money was something the Ito family didn’t have. Everything was wrapped up in keeping Fuji running.

So Jesse decided to sell Fuji. They would take a loss, but whatever they could get for selling the family business they could plow right into this new thing: Royal Sushi & Izakaya. The place would be beautiful and cool and understated: “like an old Philly building that’d been inhabited by Japanese people.” And he was going to take all the lessons he’d learned pulling Fuji back from the brink and apply them to Royal right from the start. All he had to do was convince his parents.

“It was crazy, man,” he tells me. “But my parents, they believed in me. At 23! That’s insane. But it was always all-in. This one restaurant. No fallback. But it was something I truly believed in.”

Opening Royal would take years. Jesse would be 27 by the time the first service happened. And that wasn’t an easy time.

He says, “Look, I had no money in the bank. I was so broke before the opening. You don’t even know. Everything I had, I’m trying to take care of my parents. And I’m going to, like, Rite-Aid to buy ramen cups with coupons. So this had to work. Because I didn’t have anything else.”

The Four P’s

Jesse Ito behind the bar at Royal Sushi & Izakaya / Photograph by Justin James Muir

There was no ramping up. No slow build. They opened the doors in September of 2016 and Royal was full. In the front, it was all gyoza and yakitori skewers, fat little Japanese kurobuta sausages, shumai with hot mustard, and karaage chicken wings. The tables were close-set, the bar always crowded with chairs and bodies — the entire place standing room only as people filled the narrow gap between the tables and the bar just drinking on their feet and waiting for seats to open up. The noise of the place would ring off the tin ceiling. On the brick walls, they’d project silent episodes of Gundam and Dragon Ball Z. The music was an eclectic, fuck-your-tastes mix of AC/DC, old-school hip-hop, and brawling funk, heavy on the horns.

Meanwhile, in the back, separated by nothing more than a wisp of a curtain, Jesse (with occasional help from his dad) was doing a blissful, serene omakase service. The sounds of the riot in front would drift through, flavoring the air, while a handful of customers sat and ate some of the best sushi that’d ever been served in Philly. I once did the omakase at Royal followed by a full-on sushi lunch at Morimoto barely 14 hours later, and when I was done at Morimoto, all I wanted was to go back to Queen Village and have dinner at Royal again.

Jesse and I talk about how he made this work — the planning, the ordering, the leadership, how he writes menus and the systems he built. Mostly, though, we talk about marketing, because Jesse loves to talk about marketing. Because no one ever really asks him about marketing, and, to him, marketing is everything.

Jesse stops me. “No, the food is everything.”

“Of course.”

“Because if you don’t have that right — ”

“Nothing else matters.”

When you’re studying marketing, one of the first things you learn about is the Four P’s — a system for creating a comprehensive marketing strategy for any business. First proposed by marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy in his 1960 book, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, the four P’s represented a fundamental shift in zzzzzzzz …

I get it. Marketing can be dull. And discussions of marketing strategies are, for most people, like chasing two Valiums with a warm beer. But to Jesse, they’re important. And to the story of Royal, they’re fundamental. With every choice, he was putting his career and the lives of his parents on the line.

“It was like playing roulette,” he tells me. “Black or red every time.” And he was putting everything on the table with every bet. So let’s break it down:

The First P: Price

When Royal’s omakase began, Jesse offered a mini version for $65 and a full experience (17 courses) for around $110. At the time, it was expensive, but not notably so. With drinks and tip, you could walk out having had the best of the house for maybe $150 a head. And on the izakaya side, everything was cheaper. Ten bucks for a plate of sausages, inexpensive pull-tab cans of sake. Bar snacks and cocktails.

All of this was intentional. Calculated. Beyond any simple considerations of plate cost, labor, and overhead, Jesse used pricing to position himself in what he thought to be the safest possible market for success. Remember the financial crisis and what he went through at Fuji? Who got fucked?

Exactly. The middle got fucked. So he designed Royal Sushi & Izakaya to cover both ends of the pricing spectrum with no middle at all. The izakaya would have volume. The omakase would have margins. And he (and his partners, and his parents) would be protected against whatever disasters might come next.

Cue ominous foreshadowing music …

The Second P: Product

Over time, the price of the omakase went up. Because over time, costs went up, and demand went up. Jesse got better at sourcing product, so quality went up. He could get better grains of rice, more interesting fish. He built up an infrastructure with his suppliers. He became the guy who would always get the best fish because, if he got less than the best fish, he’d send it back. Every time. And then the supplier would have to eat that cost as a loss. After a while, he started getting nothing but the best fish.

Jesse understands that, in a lot of places, narratives are created in order to create value — to justify upmarket prices and make people feel like they’re getting something special for their money. A carrot is just a carrot until you give it a name and a story. Then, suddenly, it’s worth something. It’s no longer just a carrot. But he doesn’t like the way that plays in most restaurants.

“The amount of storytelling about the fucking carrot or whatever? I will leave that out. I want the food to speak for itself. I want them to put the tuna in their mouth and just say, This is really fucking good.”

But without that constructed narrative — without the chef or the servers telling you the life story of that carrot or that tuna in order to give it value — you have to lean on a different P to get your message across. Which brings us to …

The Third P: Promotion

“It’s a lot of noise. It’s a lot of pushing. My belief has always been that [marketing and PR] should be organic. All the other P’s? They create the buzz. They drive it. Promotion can only highlight an authentic story — it can’t create a true narrative.”

Jesse has been solely in charge of Royal’s marketing since the beginning. All those gorgeous pictures on Instagram? He takes those. Every post, every video, that’s him. He has coordinated the branding of what are essentially two different restaurants sharing a single space and made it feel like a cohesive, deliberate whole. He’s been doing this since Fuji — since restaurant marketing was Constant Contact email lists and weekly newsletters. And he’s really good at it.

“The idea is to show people something I’m excited about,” he says — to give them a glimpse inside, make them feel connected. So when he goes to Tokyo to visit Toyosu fish market (where he gets most of his fish), he’ll post a spray of images of the vendors, the buyers; of himself on the floor where the tuna auctions happen, surrounded by hundreds of flash-frozen fish. He’ll post a video of himself knife shopping, butchering fish, taking in a delivery of 2.5 kilos of prime Hokkaido uni that cost him nearly three grand. Because if he’s authentically excited about the market, the fish, the uni, then the audience will be too.

The Fourth P: Place

“The last time I was in Japan, I went to this place called Den.”

Den. Two Michelin stars. Right in Shibuya, in Tokyo. One of the best restaurants in the world. He was there a couple of weeks before we started talking. A research trip.

Jesse went to Den for dinner and loved it. Was moved by it. “The authenticity,” he tells me. That’s what got him. Not of the food, but of the vibe. “The genuine happiness of the staff that you’re there.”

Inside, all the walls were signed by chefs who come from all over the world. Jesse signed too: “A big heart, Philly, Jesse.” He said that being there changed the way he thought about restaurants.

Place matters. The experience matters. Expectations can be so high at Royal, but Jesse has to meet them. Every night, he’s right there, in front of guests who are paying hundreds of dollars for 17 pieces of fish. And he loves it — he truly loves it — but he knows he has to be as present, as grateful, as authentic as they were at Den.

“No one wants some weird … I don’t know … show out of me? No, I treat everyone the same. I ask them about their lives. We talk. We catch up. A lot of the regulars, I’ve known them for years. And new people? I want to get to know them. I want them to know me.”

He stops. Thinks.

“There’s this thing, something I remember from college: You want to be everything to someone, not something to everyone.” Jesse laughs. “Everyone else is the side piece.”

Things I Learned During the Apocalypse (Part 2)

Royal’s All the Good Things dish / Photograph by Justin James Muir

In its youth, Royal Sushi & Izakaya ran seven nights a week. It did late-night service and was packed, open to close. Jesse did three turns at the omakase, two hours each — plus the time it took to clear and reset between services. And when they were done, he would often jump into the izakaya kitchen and start pan-frying gyoza just to help out.

Royal was a favorite spot for chefs. All those friends Jesse didn’t get to hang out with in high school? He had a million of them now. The place got loud. It got wild. Jesse would wipe down the kitchen at the end of the night and hit the bar. He would go out somewhere after to unwind. Fountain Porter or Townsend or wherever. He’d get home at 2 or 3 in the morning, collapse, and then have to be back in the kitchen again in a few hours.

For a while, this wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few drinks with friends after work. And anyway, he was already at the bar. What else was he going to do?

Royal opened in 2016. In 2017, Jesse nabbed his first James Beard Award nomination for Rising Star Chef of the Year. It happened again in 2018, 2019, and 2020. He didn’t win, but he was on the map. Being recognized. And Royal just kept getting busier. The hours got longer. The expectations got higher. Jesse had a house in South Philly, and he would just invite everyone over. Whole restaurant crews. Thirty, 40 people, all there until 4 a.m., drinking, passing the bong, drinking some more. It was a nonstop party, but Jesse didn’t see a problem with it because it was just The Life. It was how things were done. In the industry, he’d say in an interview long after all this, there are only two kinds of people. You’re either an addict or you’re sober. There’s no middle ground. No one really goes halfway. And he’d chosen his side.

Then, COVID. All of a sudden, everything is quiet. Everything is closed. And all of a sudden, Jesse is drinking alone. He’s getting up, hitting the bong, getting plastered. Royal is dark for three months, and that’s how he copes. He’s in a panic because he’s never not worked before. His anxiety is through the roof because no one has any idea what is happening, what might be coming next. He’s worried about what’s going to happen to the restaurant, how he’s going to keep his house, how he can take care of his parents. His staff.

“Look,” Jesse says to me, “if you study economics, you know that every nine to 12 years, there’s something bad.” A recession, a war, whatever. Something goes wrong regularly. Like clockwork. And between the izakaya and the omakase, he thought he was prepared for anything. He’d learned his lessons during his first apocalypse and built systems that could withstand any kind of downturn. “But this? A fucking pandemic? How do you prepare for that? No one wanted to work. It was dangerous to work. It fucking suuuucked.”

The world stopped in March of 2020. A bit more than five years ago now. And if the financial crisis of 2008 had been bad, this was worse. During the three months that Royal was closed, Jesse and his partners bootstrapped a takeout program that would become ridiculously popular during the first year of the pandemic. It started with just him and one other cook, two days a week — a pop-up selling sushi boxes, beautiful fish, passing them to customers lined up on the street.

“Each week, we’d add one more thing,” Jesse says. And even though the internet was a terrible place to be in those days, he fell back on old lessons. “I kept telling myself, I can’t fail. It had to work. I took pictures. Amped up the social media. We would do nigiri trays for $350, $500, and they’d get 15,000 likes. That put me on a national level.”

When Jesse gets scared, he gets angry. And when he gets angry, he wants to work. He wants to fix things. COVID was a problem, obviously, but the real problem, for him, was that there were no customers. There was no money coming in. No way to pay his staff. How do you fix that? You find a way to feed people. And then you tell them about it. Royal was closed for three months, did takeout for nine months, then did spaced-out, indoor/outdoor dining at the izakaya for another six. It took a year and a half before they reopened for omakase. And by that time, Jesse had changed.

He got sober on December 1st of 2020. He didn’t talk about it publicly for almost a year because he was afraid of relapsing, afraid of the pressure of having other people knowing what he was going through and then being disappointed in him if he failed.

With sobriety came the realization of how close he’d come to ruining everything he’d built, and the idea that he could change. That the pandemic, as awful as it was, also presented an opportunity to rebuild Royal differently.

“Things stopped,” he explained to me during one of our last conversations. “The train has stopped. Like, maybe for the first time ever. You can step off, take a look around, ask, Do I really want to be doing this?”

Without the shutdown, the months of takeout and the half life of limited seatings, streeteries, and outdoor service, there would’ve never been a moment for self-reflection or a chance to make significant, fundamental changes to the way Royal operated. Before the pandemic, every day was about getting through that day. Orders. Deliveries. Menus to write. A full restaurant, open to close, eight hours of omakase, smiling and laughing for the crowd no matter what’s going on behind the scenes.

So Royal cut back to five nights a week. No more late-nights. And the omakase would be limited to two seatings. They kept takeout as an option to make up some of the loss because the systems were already in place, but Jesse also realized that he needed to hire another chef.

Enter Justin Bacharach.

“It was like, how did I not see this before?” Jesse says. He’d spent years essentially running two different kitchens in the same restaurant himself — one of which required his full attention every night, and the other of which also required his full attention every night. Justin, a dedicated student of Japanese cuisine and its modern iterations who’d come from the Cheu Noodle Bar expanded universe, was the solution to that problem. Jesse hired him, put him into the izakaya kitchen, and let him make it his own.

That was four years ago. Jesse loves the guy like a brother and trusts him more than anyone. They’ve been through a thousand services together, more awards, more acclaim. Royal (considering its new schedule, and Jesse’s new focus on self-care, balance, and wellness) is doing as well as it ever has.

But Jesse’s not done yet.

Next Big Thing

/ Photograph by Justin James Muir

By the time you read this, Jesse Ito and Justin Bacharach’s new restaurant, dancerobot — yes, lowercase, yes, all one word — will be about a month out from its debut at 1710 Sansom Street in Rittenhouse. It will be a Japanese restaurant, doing modern takes on classic dishes, but without sushi. “Comfort-oriented, but elevated” is the way Jesse describes it. Te-shoku and Japanese pancakes; a “huge baking program” with bao, curry pan, milk bread — all of it made in-house. Justin will be in command of the kitchen because the concept, Jesse explains, is rooted in a lot of the things Justin is good at. The idea of it came about organically. And Jesse was never going to open a place just to open a place.

“I didn’t want to put just someone there. I wanted a chef-owner there. I would only want to open with someone I trust.”

And Jesse trusts Justin. He believes in him.

The idea for dancerobot came from traveling in Japan and seeing little cafes stuck inside buildings from 50 years ago. And they’re dated — like nothing has been changed since the ’80s. Like someone opened them and then forgot about them. We’re talking about that feeling of time travel, walking into these liminal spaces where everything feels wrong and yet perfectly right at the same time.

“Like, have you ever gone into a Friendly’s?” he says. “And you just know that no one has touched this place in years. Nothing has changed. And it feels like you’re walking into a piece of your childhood?”

That is the feeling he’s going for with dancerobot. Or part of it, anyway. Not a theme restaurant, but more like something inspired by the idea of 1980s Japan. Something you feel more than see. Oh, and the name? That just came to him. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s perfect. He tells me how he was in the shower and he was answering emails —

“Wait a minute. You answer emails in the shower?”

“Yeah …”

And now Jesse is trying to explain, hiccups of laughter interrupting him every couple of words, and he’s saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this, Jason. Maybe people don’t want to know that I’m, like, answering their emails in the shower or whatever.”

“So you’re in the shower, and you’re what? Holding the phone out of the water?”

“I don’t know … I just love a nice, hot shower, man! Like a really long, hot shower. And I don’t always have time! I’m just trying to, you know, optimize my time!”

So yeah. The shower. That’s where dancerobot came from. But the minute he said it out loud, he knew it had to be the name. The restaurant of the future, based on the past.

It will, when it opens, represent fully one-third of Jesse’s entire résumé.

About Last Night

Jesse’s life is a lot quieter now than it was a few years ago. He wakes up at 7:30 or 8, goes to the gym, edits playlists in his head, answers emails in the shower. He gets to the restaurant around 10, and, with Justin watching over the izakaya, he can focus mostly on the omakase. He cleans fish the way he’s been doing since he was 15. He washes the rice the way his dad taught him. Some days, Massaharu is in the kitchen with him, making tamago, fussing with recipes. But not every day. There are tastings and meetings, deliveries. He has to tend to the Instagram feed.

Service for the omakase starts at 6. It’s done by 10, maybe 10:30. He’s out the door by 11, goes home, eats, watches something on TV, and falls asleep.

“I don’t go out anymore,” he says. “A long time ago, someone told me that the difference between a chef and a cook is that the chef isn’t out at night. I think that’s kinda true.”

Most days are like this now. Jesse has been doing this a long time. There’s no panic on the floor when the line starts forming outside on a Friday night. In the kitchen, no one yells. It’s cool in a way that Jesse never really imagined it could be.

He tells me a story. Not about food, but about last night. He was getting off shift, ready to head home to the new apartment he just moved into last week, and his girlfriend called. It was the same call he’s gotten hundreds of times — just her checking in to see how service went, how he was doing. So she calls, she asks him how everything went, and he’s about to say the same thing he always says: that it was fine. All good. But he stops himself.

“Because we’ve been talking, you know?” (He and I, he means.) “And I’ve been thinking a lot about … I don’t know. All of this. And I thought, service is very hard. But I do it every day, so it seems easy. Like, I’m there. I’m performing. I’m making sushi. For hours. And I don’t really think about it because I’ve been doing the same thing for so long.”

So when he says “fine,” he doesn’t mean fine. He means normal. He means nothing extraordinary happened. Nothing caught fire. Nothing blew up.

“Doing this job, it isn’t ever easy,” he says. “What I wanted to tell her was that it was hard, but that hard was okay. That these nights, it doesn’t take anything extra, but it takes everything.”

And that’s what you have to be willing to give. Which is fine with Jesse. He’s been doing this a long time. He’s really, really good at it. It’s his life.

And he’s never really known anything else.

Published as “Piece by Piece” in the June 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.