Niku X, the new Los Angeles yakiniku destination from Michelin-star chef Shin Thompson, is about exclamation points—but also about nuanced sourcing.
Located at Downtown LA’s gleaming Wilshire Grand Center complex, the newest spot from the rapidly expanding Chubby Cattle restaurant group makes a spectacle of cooking beef on tabletop robatayaki grills. Its yakiniku tasting menu includes a box, billowing with smoke above six different cuts of Wagyu. The smoke clouds intensify when a staff member opens the enclosure. It’s a literal smoke show at a glamorous restaurant that’s already been Instagrammed by globetrotting DJs like Charly Jordan and Zedd (Chubby Cattle was born in Vegas, where dinner is often a spectacle and where both these DJs are headliners). But the real point of this box is to showcase the difference between the domestic and international Wagyu that’s inside it.