The World's Best Restaurants · 2026
Los Angeles, United States
Kato translates Taiwanese American memory through the produce and seafood of Los Angeles with unusual restraint.
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Kato translates Taiwanese American memory through the produce and seafood of Los Angeles with unusual restraint. Jon Yao does not reproduce a fixed regional repertoire. He isolates the taste of a broth, preserved vegetable, tea, shellfish or banquet dish, then rebuilds it through careful temperature, texture and sauce work. The larger home opened in 2022 gave that cooking a more complete dining room, a serious beverage programme and space for a separate bar menu without dissolving its identity. Recent evidence shows a restaurant more assured than during the move: the seafood progression is precise, service is composed and the Taiwanese references remain legible without becoming explanatory theatre.
Taiwanese flavours and family references are reduced to their essential taste structures, then rebuilt with Southern California products rather than copied as prestige versions of familiar dishes.
Fish and shellfish carry the menu's most exact work, allowing cure, broth, smoke, sauce and raw preparation to develop one clear progression.
Four years in the current dining room have given the expanded service, bar and beverage programme time to settle without weakening the original culinary authorship.
The assessment verifies both live menus, prices, fee policy, location, operating pattern and more than four years of the current restaurant. It uses recent independent reporting to test whether the 2022 expansion has matured, while retaining transition-period criticism and current value concerns aseditorial record limits. No claim of a direct or unannounced visit is made.
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