Jesse Ito’s Dancerobot Announces Opening Date

Image courtesy of dancerobot

Here’s some very good news for a Friday afternoon that a lot of us (myself included) have been waiting for.

Jesse Ito’s new restaurant, dancerobot, has just announced its opening date. And it is next week.

No, for real. Tuesday, September 30th, is the big day. 17th and Sansom.

The announcement came via Instagram just about an hour ago. And reservations are live right now. So first things first: Go and snag yourself a table before they’re all gone. It’s okay. I’ll wait.

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You’re back? Cool. If, as has been happening with alarming frequency lately, the whole place was already booked solid by the time you got to the reservations site, don’t worry. Just like on the Izakaya side of Jesse’s other spot (Royal Sushi & Izakaya), all bar seats are being held for walk-ins.

Though, granted, the lines for Izakaya can be long. And people tend to start lining up long before the doors actually open. And there’s absolutely nothing that makes me think that the situation at dancerobot is going to be any different. But still, it’s a shot. And in the early days of hot new restaurant openings, you take what you can get.

A preview of dancerobot’s menu / Photograph courtesy of Jesse Ito

So why all the excitement about this place? Well, for starters, it’s Jesse Ito’s second restaurant and Jesse has long been one of the best, most inventive, most talented chefs in this city. Dude was basically born into the kitchen, spent his entire life in and around restaurants, spent every nickel he had to get Royal open to the public back in a culinary moment when neither izakayas nor omakase menus were the licenses to print money that they are today, and then parlayed that one restaurant — with its split personality and stunningly good, impossible to book eight-seat sushi bar — into the kind of place that could get him eight James Beard Award nominations in nine years and boast a waitlist more than 1,000 names long.

For years, that’s all he did: Just Royal, nothing more. And for a long time, it didn’t seem like he wanted anything more. Always a perfectionist, always pushing himself to refine and streamline what’s right in front of him, Jesse focused solely on this one place. But across hours spent on the phone, talking to him for a long and wide-ranging profile a few months back, he told me that a lot of things had to come together for him to be willing to consider expanding. Sobriety, a trip to Japan, shower emails, a trusted chef-partner backing him up, the right space, a name — all of that. But mostly, it was a feeling.

“Like, have you ever gone into a Friendly’s?” he asked me. “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 was the feeling he was trying to capture with dancerobot. A sense of time-travel, of capturing a piece of the past and freezing it in place. He told me about little cafes in Japan, stuck inside buildings from 50 years ago, that feel like they haven’t been touched since the day they opened; about an imaginary future that never really occurred.

The name came to him in the shower. It doesn’t mean anything. But it feels like it does. That’s why he thought it was so perfect. And he’s right.

Cocktails at dancerobot / Photograph by Jesse Ito

This time around, Jesse is partnering up with his longtime izakaya chef, Justin Bacharach, who’s onboard as co-owner and exec chef at dancerobot. The menu is Japanese diner food. “Comfort-oriented, but elevated,” was how he put it to me, a style that’s pretty much Bacharach’s specialty. And, as if today’s news weren’t already good enough, dancerobot’s menu is currently available online, so you can see the spread of small plates, spicy shrimp gyoza, kare pan, fried eggplant with miso glaze, jidori egg omelettes, Japanese pizza toast, fusilli with a dashi-mentaiko cream sauce, wagyu roast beef with miso mashed potatoes and dashi gravy, and green Negroni sours at the bar. There are plans for a full bakery program in-house and a Japanese breakfast service. Brunch and late-night services are listed as “coming soon” on the dancerobot website. The potential for this place is enormous. The expectations, maybe even more so.

And we’re all going to get to see for ourselves exactly how Jesse’s dancerobot vision translates in just a few short days. Personally, I’m excited. A little bit worried. Resigned to the fact that I may be waiting a long time to get a seat at that bar. But mostly excited.

You can check out the menu (and make your reservations if you haven’t already tried) right here.

In the meantime, when are we all thinking about starting to line up for that Tuesday opening? Monday night? Sunday, right after the Eagles game? Whatever it is, I’ll see you all there.