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“Better to do a good idea at an unbelievable level where you’ve looked at every single detail than add 15 ingredients and six edible flowers and have it cost way more than you want it to cost,” says chef Colin Sato of Et Al. “I want the half-price version that is just as good.”
He’s speaking literally about a katsu sando, a fried pork cutlet sandwich on white bread, one of the lunch offerings at Natsukashii, the first brick-and-mortar restaurant to spring from Tulsa chef collective Et Al., slated to open in March at 14 N. Cheyenne Ave., in the Gradient building. He’s also speaking generally about the cooking principles that will define the restaurant.
“A lot of our food is this way, where it just kind of looks like what it is,” Sato says. “It’s a fried pork chop sandwich, and when you look at it, you’ll be like, that is a fried pork chop sandwich.”
The magic happens on the first bite: in his words, “juicy and hot, perfectly seasoned, everything nicely balanced and cared for.” Excellent, but simple. Very Japanese … or Japanese-y, anyway.
Natsukashii’s Instagram describes it as an “all-day Japanese-y cafe and izakaya,” with the translations of the two Japanese words doing the heavy philosophical lifting—natsukashii: a positive nostalgia, and izakaya: stay-drink-place. That all-day descriptor is critical, too.
“I really want to make a place where you could in theory go, get a rice ball and a thing of miso soup in the morning, and then you had a little bowl of cold noodles, and then you came in for an order of fried chicken and a small beer at happy hour, and then you stayed and had a little sake, some fish, whatever,” Sato says. “Not only is it possible, but this is food I could eat every day.”
Natsukashii will open at 8 a.m. for downtown early birds, with a studied matcha and coffee program curated by Andrea Schultz (HQ Coffee + Matcha) and Jacob Howard (Coracle). Howard’s passion for the idea of the “third space” plays into his role as coffee director, and he’s something of a coffee shokunin, believing that excellence in a craft should and does extend to something as potentially simple as coffee or tea.
“Borrowing language from the wine world, we will be featuring coffees that can be understood as Old World and New World, traditional and contemporary, low acid and high acid,” Howard says, though he’s also excited to debut coffee sodas, a concept in its early development.
To pair with the coffee and tea menu, Et Al.’s Chloe Butler (Butter Bar) will lead the pastry program, focused primarily on laminated doughs in the form of croissants, danishes, and more with Japanese flavors: a black sesame morning bun or an okonomi sausage roll, complete with traditional okonomiyaki toppings like bonito flakes. Look also for a menchi-katsu egg and cheese, a sandwich that Sato says “may not please the ancestors” but that they probably would have enjoyed if it had been available to them at a reasonable price. Natsukashii will also keep its popular onigiri (rice ball) available for breakfast, a nod to its pop-ups with Oklahoma City’s HQ Coffee.
For lunch, the restaurant will switch over to what the team loosely calls “Dumpling Night minus dumplings,” in ode to Et Al.’s beloved Wednesday night pop-ups at Foolish Things. Expect rice bowls, noodles, the aforementioned katsu sando and other Japanese-y sandwiches like potato salad, a particular favorite of Butler’s.
“I grew up in a very meat-and-potatoes family,” Butler says. “I don’t personally really align with the clean, finesse-y flavors I think people associate with Japanese food, and one small concern I’ve had is that I don’t want people to think Natsukashii is a sushi bar.”
That doesn’t mean Et Al. will abandon its fresh fish specials; the team wants only to drive home that there’s an intent of accessibility driving Natsukashii, allowing for twinges of familiarity and an absence of overwhelm while you dine, even if you’re eating something you’ve never had before. This means keeping things simple. As Sato puts it, “Make the menu as small as possible but no smaller. When building dishes, make it as simple as possible but no simpler.”
Nowhere is this simplicity more apparent than in the bar’s draft beer selection, as in one.
“On the beverage side, one thing we won’t do is have a whole back bar of a thousand different bears to choose from,” says chef Sam Luna. It’s a different approach.”
Natsukashii’s house beer, produced by Heirloom Rustic Ales, is called Yanchan, or “rascal.” Happy hour—dubbed Rascal Hour here—patrons can ask for a Little Rascal and a shot or a Big Rascal in a frosty mug, or they can delve into the cocktail menu, helmed by Maria Kim (Momofuku DC, Maydan).
“The philosophy behind Natsukashii's bar menu is fueled by what the Et Al. team already does best: creating and serving delicious things with a welcome hand,” Kim says. “The fact that this will be the first real bar we get to create is definitely intimidating but also wildly exciting. It made me think about how we can recreate and reinforce the warmth and authenticity that Et Al. has worked so hard to grow organically.”
She has aimed for a bar menu that parallels the diverse disciplines and backgrounds of the whole team. The restaurant may focus on homestyle Japanese, but that’s guided by the tastes, skills, cultural backgrounds, and interests of all involved. The result, Kim says, is “a bar program that's playful in tone but serious in craft.”
One of the drinks she’s most excited to debut is the umé martini, showcasing both a Japanese gin and a gin from WanderFolk in Guthrie, as well as a plum liqueur and a touch of MSG: “a savory, dry plum martini that drinks really clean but full-bodied. I think it'll go great with a lot of dishes, but also kicks ass alone.”
After Rascal Hour, think of dinner as “Dumpling Night plus plus plus.” A full restaurant space will allow the culinary team to churn out dishes that were difficult to pull off in a coffee shop: karaage (fried chicken), dumplings, fish both raw or grilled, curry, and so on. Tools like a noodle cooker, a broiler, a strong oven, and a permanent grill are new to the Et Al. team.
“I've been kind of joking that I think everyone will feel like we suddenly learned how to cook,” Sato says.
Dumpling Night and other pop-up devotees will find their favorites here and also exactly the right amount more; they just need to be patient, which isn’t new to Et Al. devotees anyhow. (Natsukashii will be the new home base for all future Et Al. pop-ups, which means no more tracking them all over the city.) The team planned to open last year, but now, past the fundraising, hiring, and construction challenges—the restaurant space was formerly a wood shop, set above historic horse stables—the wait is nearly over.
The same clean, thoughtful attention to detail in the food carries into every little thing about the restaurant. The branding, done by NVM Studio, is a combination of soft-loud, with textured lines and bold color contrasts. The interior design, led by Samantha Zitter of Z3 Interiors, follows suit. Some tables are cut from larger pieces of wood so that when pushed together, they form a continuous grain. Custom woodwork in organic shapes adorns the ceiling. Sleek tile lines the bar. It’s meant to be warm and welcoming; hospitality is, after all, still listed first in Et Al.’s core principles.
“Not that there's anything wrong with Japanese as prestige cuisine, and in a way we benefit from it, but our stance is we’d much rather have this be food that just becomes a part of Tulsa; it doesn't feel like this exotic other thing,” Sato says. “It’s more important to be Japanese in spirit than to be necessarily Japanese in origin.”
Chef Luna, who joined the Et Al. team with no professional culinary experience after taking one of Sato’s cooking classes years ago, says he grew up in the Nashville area with Southern food, chicken and dumplings, “the batter type.”
“If you told me when I was 18 that dumplings would be such a cornerstone in my life, I'd have had a lot of questions,” Luna says. A few months after joining the team, he visited home and put together a Dumpling Night-inspired dinner party for family and friends.
“I spent a whole day folding dumplings with my mom and just doing that, talking about everything for hours,” Luna says. “And when I hosted, they all got to see it’s more than food. It’s something bigger. It’s gathering people, bringing people together over food.”
Natsukashii has big plans in little dishes. It’s nostalgia in situ—a place to eat, stay, and drink, but also to feel.
