Restaurateurs can be experts at pivoting. They have to be to succeed, especially in New Orleans. And business partners Tam Nguyen and chef Yiyu Weng have pivoted double time since they opened their sushi restaurant at 1300 Magazine St. in March.
First off, there’s the name. They originally chose the name Kuro, which means black in Japanese. Unfortunately, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, made it clear that their Kuro restaurant was not to be replicated outside of the company brand. So Nguyen and Weng christened their new restaurant Koru.
“We are a little fish, so we changed the name by swapping the vowels,” Nguyen says. “I’m not sure if that means anything in Japanese, but it sounds good.”
Then there was the shift in partners. Tommy Mei, a well-known sushi chef from Shogun in Metairie, was in on the deal at the outset. But there was a disconnect, and he left the business. Fortunately, Weng (pronounced win) and co-chef Tim Fang, worked by Mei’s side at Shogun since 2018.
“We worked on many dishes together,” says Weng, who was born in Fuzhou in southern China. “We have been a team for a long time, and we know what our customers love.”
Koru sources much of its seafood from Japan by way of a Los Angeles distributor. Some specialty fish come from Europe, including Scottish salmon.
About 70% of guests opt for the chefs’ omakase menu, putting themselves in the chefs’ hands. The chefs choose the courses, and the menu changes depending on what seafood is in the house. Generally priced at around $8-$9 per piece, with a five-piece minimum, the dishes will keep coming until diners signal they’ve had enough.
On a recent Saturday, waiters delivered a refined array of dressed nigiri and sashimi to guests dining under the glow of the “Let the Good Times Roe” neon sign, a natural social media backdrop.
The goal in dressing sushi is to enhance the flavor of the fish without hijacking it. Chef Weng has this down. It might be a tangle of fresh ginger or a mount of pickled wasabi. A perfectly briny Kumamoto oyster is dolloped with buttery uni and pearls of salmon roe.
The chef lightly torches a large sea scallop, leaving the inside raw, adding silky foie gras to up the ante. Japanese amberjack is drizzled with an earthy truffle sauce. There might be thinly sliced halibut, Japanese red snapper, bluefin toro or black snapper from Greece in the house.
The menu is compact but covers all the important bases. The primary focus is on sushi along with popular maki rolls. But there also is a good array of hot appetizers, such as baked salmon with snow crab and stir-fried udon noodles with seafood. Beyond the usual seaweed salad, there is a poke salad brimming with seafood.
There isn’t a designated bar beyond the sushi bar, but Koru carries small-batch sake, like the fruity Green Ridge, along with Japanese beer and original cocktails like the yuzu sour. Diners can bring their own wine with a $25 corkage fee.
Weng hadn’t intended to be a chef. His family came to New Orleans when he was still in school, and he joined them in 2006.
“I’d never been here before,” he says. “I had no idea about anything.”
Weng worked at a few Asian restaurants, including Mandarin House Chinese buffet in Metairie. When his uncle, then a sushi chef at Samurai in Gulfport, Mississippi, offered him the chance to apprentice, he jumped at the opportunity and worked there for seven years. Then he came back home to New Orleans and worked at Sake Cafe before Shogun hired him.
Nguyen hails from the West Bank and after selling his auto accessories business in 2021, he was looking for a new opportunity.
“I thought it would be a great idea to open an elevated sushi restaurant,” he says.
Although not experienced in hospitality, Nguyen ran his own business for years. He handles all the paperwork, bar inventory and back-end bits, while Weng and his team take care of the kitchen.
They’ve figured out how to roll with the changes and focus simply on sushi. It works at Koru, no matter how you spell it.
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