Inside the Retro-Cool Dreamscape of Dancerobot

Dishes at dancerobot / Photography by Aaron Richter

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Jesse Ito thought up the name dancerobot in the shower.

Yes, all one word. Yes, with a little d. The name doesn’t mean anything, but it’s meant to evoke something. A feeling, or a vibe. A sense of the future as seen from the past.

It’s a restaurant made for his friend and former sous chef, Justin Bacharach (who spent years running the day-to-day on the izakaya side of Royal Sushi and Izakaya, and is now exec and co-owner at dancerobot), and it’s meant to live at that friction point between authenticity and mimicry, between Japanese diner food and American pop obsessions.

Early on, in dancerobot’s crowded dining room in the weeks after its September opening, you could sense that wild urge to make something weird. It shone through in the octopus takoyaki speared on little toothpicks and melon cocktails that taste like electric Jolly Ranchers, in the brick walls plastered with old VHS-era movie posters and serving plates of milk bread pizza toast — all designed to capture some vision of an ’80s/’90s Japanese childhood that never was.

dancerobot chef Justin Bacharach

Some people didn’t like it. Some people were always not going to like it because they wanted Izakaya 2.0, but what they got was something mostly (but not completely) different. And different will always piss some people off.

But different will always be fascinating to me because in difference there is change. To say that dancerobot was merely good then but great now is easy but meaningless. What’s interesting to me is why. Watching the evolution of shower-time vision versus the reality of Thursday-night dinner service months into a first-year run can tell you a million things about a restaurant — and whom it’s there to serve.

So you walk in and dancerobot is physically the same, but it operates now without the sweating panic of those early days — the hard rush of tables, open to close. It feels like a place you can settle into and breathe a little. The (relative) quiet and a bar with a few open stools at 6 p.m. on a weeknight can make it feel more yours than everyone’s.

There’s no sushi at dancerobot. No chirashi. But there are things that echo them — deconstructions that Bacharach uses to play with the idea of bare ingredients set in balance against each other. Salmon and apples were on special early in the new year — an unusual combination, but it works: cubes of meltingly soft raw fish, paired with the sweet sharpness of Cosmic Crisp apples and the crunch of fried nori, all dressed in a sesame sauce with a lace of spice.

The katsu sando

The place has shifted over the past few months, shaping into a combination of what dancerobot wanted to be and what it has become. There’s no more pizza toast, but the playlist is still mostly early-’90s radio pop, mumbling along on the back of a dozen muted conversations. There’s no brunch yet, but it’s coming; no Japanese breakfast service, as was originally planned, but the jidori egg omelet, with its soft skin and curded insides, is still a winner — warm, Instagram-ready, sharpened with a sauce of mentaiko mayo and Philly’d up with Cooper Sharp. A “hamburg steak” has taken the place of the Wagyu pot roast, but I’m more interested in the kare pan — baseball-sized, deep-fried in panko, and stuffed with braised beef cheek and Bacharach’s gentle house-made Japanese curry — and the massive katsu sando with its towering shokupan milk bread bun and pork-and-beef cutlet seems like a stunt (so tall, so seemingly impossible to eat) until you’re halfway through and realize it’s one of the best sandwiches you’ve ever tried.

Once upon a time, dancerobot’s gyoza arrived stacked in a silver serving bowl, soaking in a well of chili oil, but now they come served flat, laid out on a plate, stuffed with chunks of chopped shrimp, skins crisp and still lacy from the pan. Previous versions got soggy in oil or went limp from the lingering wet heat of being piled on top of each other. But these were as perfect as I’ve ever had them.

Kare pan and a sake juice box

And it goes on like this: plate after plate, service after service, these small tweaks, little improvements, and careful adjustments to the vision of what dancerobot can be in the real world. Was it a perfect restaurant when it opened? No way. But neither was Royal Izakaya. Neither is any restaurant that’s truly trying to say something or create something both special and lasting, that’s trying to be something more than a fleeting daydream that came to someone in the shower.

That kind of thing takes time. And if dancerobot is just finding greatness now, imagine how much better it might be tomorrow.

3 Stars — Come from anywhere in Philly

Rating Key
0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “Everything Old Is New Again” in the March 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.