Umi is a Small Series of Perfections

Kaizen: a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement, translating to “change for better”

The term kaizen is typically reserved for large manufacturing corporations striving to gradually improve productivity and work in a more efficient manner, from the CEO to the assembly line worker.

Yet doesn’t it only seem logical that the most successful restaurants adopt this same approach?

Co-Executive Chef Todd Dae Kulper carries himself much like Tiger Woods. He’s humble and rather soft-spoken, though a clear hunger lies beyond that visage.

He, along with Chef Tasuku Murakami, runs the kitchen at Umi, one of Atlanta’s premier restaurants, serving sushi and other Japanese dishes in a modern and sophisticated setting. It’s hard not to feel chic while dining there. There exists a rare synergistic harmony at all levels of the restaurant. The aesthetic is slick and sexy. The servers are energetic, knowledgeable, and helpful no matter the scope or subject of your inquiry. And the food is simply some of the finest you’ll ever have the pleasure of ingesting.

Most restaurants that hit the cruising altitude Umi has reached would likely consider every day a blessing, counting down the precious seconds until the quality reaches a plateau and slowly but surely begins its inevitable downward descent.

But Umi is not like most restaurants, and Chef Todd is not like most chefs. The concept of kaizen doesn’t allow anybody in any facet of the operation to slow down. It’s about a never-ending pursuit of improvement, whether tweaking the salinity of a marinade or spending months optimizing the texture of a sauce.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Chef Todd about his race towards an indefinite finish line as well as his eclectic background, his pursuit of umami, and life with a pet python.

Questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you tell me about your background? 

I was born in Korea and adopted at the age of two to an American family in northeast Iowa. I grew up on a 400-acre dairy farm, where I helped my family milk cows and raise beef cattle and pigs up until the age of 16 when I went to the University of Iowa on a physics, mathematics, and astronomy scholarship.

I went to college for a little bit but the experience wasn’t quite what I expected, so I started washing dishes for Red Lobster. I loved the restaurant industry and grew from there, moving into higher-end restaurants.

What are some of the places you worked at after Red Lobster?

So I joined an American steakhouse, which was my first experience in a full-production kitchen with super high volume. Looking back at it, the types of things that nightmares were made of (laughs). It was just so busy, making so many steaks. It felt more like factory work. But it was a great experience learning how to do high volume. I learned how to streamline stuff, and how to make it faster and more efficient. 

And then from there, I went to a small Japanese restaurant in Iowa where I started doing teppanyaki [a style of Japanese cuisine (often confused with hibachi) that uses an iron griddle, called a teppan, to cook food]. So I was doing that for a couple of years and then branched off into French cuisine when I worked for a French bistro in Iowa and learned basic French techniques. 

From there, I traveled around. I’ve lived in Iowa, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Miami, Honolulu, Saigon, and now Atlanta. But most notably, in the mid-2000s, I spent quite a bit of time at Nobu Miami as well as a very brief stint at The French Laundry. I actually did six events with Nobu San himself [Nobu Matsuhisa, Japanese celebrity chef and founder of the Nobu restaurant chain; “San” is a title of respect].

Can you tell me more about your time at The French Laundry?

My time at the French Laundry was very brief. The opportunity arose at The South Beach Food and Wine Festival. It was Ferran Adrià’s [Spanish chef considered one of the best in the world] tribute dinner so all these rockstar chefs from all over the world came in to honor him for his achievements. Nobu San was in charge of the third course of the dinner, and right behind us was Thomas Keller [the world-renowned chef and restaurateur of The French Laundry and Per Se, among others]. So we did our thing and got to meet Thomas, then he invited us to come out to the French Laundry.

So I went out there and worked as a stage [pronounced “staahj”, a stage is essentially an unpaid kitchen intern who learns new techniques] and then was offered a position but couldn’t really accept it for the full-time because their Chefs de Partie [line cooks in charge of a particular area in a kitchen] never leave so if one of those guys did, I would’ve had two weeks to get out there. With my lease in Miami, I couldn’t just get up and leave. But we’ve maintained contact ever since. Thomas has actually eaten at Umi.

I’m sure that was daunting. 

It was definitely daunting preparing food for one of your childhood idols. That was around 2019 and right when he got here, after all those years, he still remembered me, was like “Hey, Chef Todd, how are you doing?” It was an amazing experience being away from that restaurant for so long and for him to still remember me.

Now for a little curveball: you have a pet python and a pet Dalmatian. How’d you end up with a snake?

So I’ve had Zeus for a little over three years now, and it started when we were in an apartment where they didn’t allow furry pets. But my daughter really wanted a pet. 

So I had a friend who had a python and got to know it and found out they’re just so docile and cool and fun. So he helped me get one for my daughter and she ended up loving the guy. He’s definitely a full-fledged member of the family…he even gets his own stocking at Christmas time. He’s also easy to take care of, which is great since I’m so busy as a chef. So he’ll just sit and chill until we’re ready for him.

Harry, the Dalmation, came a couple of years ago. We bought a house and with it, got the green light from my wife to get a dog. So we found this mixed Dalmatian and drove to meet him and the second my daughter saw him, she just fell in love. And he’s been inseparable from the family ever since. He’s so cute.

Do the dog and the snake get along? 

The dog doesn’t really care about the snake, but I would say the snake hates the dog. 

It’s like a cartoon.

Let’s talk more about Japanese cuisine. Umi says that it “unites classic along with modern Japanese flavors in a sophisticated, contemporary setting”. How would you describe the modernization of Japanese cooking?

What I like about Japanese cuisine is it’s one of those cuisines that’s water-based so it’s naturally very healthy. It’s a lot of broths and not a lot of stir-frying oil. There’s also just an expansive list of ingredients, outside of the common, things like yuzu [a citrus fruit] and miso [a thick paste derived from fermented soybeans] and stuff like that. If you really start getting deep into it, there’s a lot of really interesting vegetables and fish and stuff like that to work with.

We take the more obscure stuff that people don’t know but is still very well known in Asia (Korean ingredients overlap a little bit as well). First, we find the traditional way of preparing those and then utilize a methodology of how we can twist them without losing their essence. And that’s one of the biggest things for us when we go modern with these ingredients. We ask: what is the ingredient? How is it traditionally prepared? What is its essence? What makes it so special? And then we find creative ways to use it without losing the tradition.

One example would be sansho, which is a Japanese peppercorn that’s like a cross between black pepper and Sichuan peppercorn, so it has a little numbing characteristic to it. And traditionally we use it a lot for barbecued eel because the flavors interact really well. But we’ll twist it up a little bit and change it with something like a green peppercorn because that has a slight numbing flavor as well. And then we might do something like a Japanese au poivre [a steak dish where the meat is coated with coarsely cracked peppercorns to form a peppery crust] with the sansho peppercorns. And we’ll just twist it around and utilize the flavors in a way that makes sense. 

We don’t want to take an ingredient and throw it in such a different direction that it loses its essence and its purpose and just starts creating confusion. 

I’ve noticed that after eating a Japanese meal, you don’t walk away feeling as full or even sluggish as you do from other types of extravagant meals. Is that because of the water-based factor or is there more to it?

There is that water-based element too, but at the same time when we’re preparing the food, we keep it pretty clean and pure. When you start getting into those Thanksgiving-style meals, where you just want to take a nap after you eat it, it’s the balance of the fats, the carbs, the proteins, and the vegetables. When you get a dish here, we don’t necessarily do the starch, the vegetable, and the protein… it’s just the protein. 

When you have a dish, there’s one star on that dish and sometimes we feel like everything else around that star is just fluff. It doesn’t really need to be there. So we take away all the fluff and focus on what we call the object of most desire. And then we maximize that object of most desire to where that’s the thing that you want to eat and everything else becomes unnecessary. And then doing that over several courses, you start to get a better balance of protein to starch so you don’t feel as heavy.

We also don’t use a lot of dairy, which can definitely make a dish very heavy. 

At the risk of a cliche question, what is your “desert island” Japanese dish?

When it really comes down to it, I think nothing is purer than a perfectly-cooked bowl of rice. 

It’s simple, but it’s hard to do. When it’s perfect and steaming hot, and you take that one bite, it hits all of the little triggers in your body that say, “That’s comforting. That’s what I like.” 

Besides that, I feel like I’d be pretty adaptable on a desert island and just find stuff and make it. But I think I’d miss that bowl of rice the most.

So what brought you here to Umi?

I was working at a restaurant called Doraku, which was basically right across the street. And then I became a free agent and the partners here pursued me and brought me aboard. This was almost six years ago. 

They originally brought me in to fill a leadership void in the kitchen. Then, knowing my creativity, they asked me to expand upon the menu and help entertain the guests. And I had similar clientele at the last restaurant, so it was a very easy transition to where my customers [at Doraku] just came across the street and started coming over here.

Was it intimidating coming to a restaurant that already had such a clear sense of its identity?

It was, but what made the transition much easier for me were those experiences at Nobu and the French Laundry. I knew the reputation of the restaurant, but I was very confident that I could come into this restaurant and have a spot and a voice.

If it’s somebody’s first time coming to Umi, what do they have to order?

If it’s your first time here, the first thing that Farshid [owner Farshid Arshid] and I say is everyone, from the CEO to the plumber, loves the Spicy Tuna Crispy Rice [spicy tuna tartare on lightly-fried crispy sushi rice with jalapeño slices]. So that would be the first thing that you get because that’s one of our signature dishes. That’s what helped put Umi on the map. It’s beautiful. That’d be the first thing that they get. 

If they’re okay with eating raw, the Yellowtail Jalapeño [thinly-sliced yellowtail, jalapeño pepper, cilantro, and ponzu sauce], is another thing that you should definitely get. 

And then we have our signature dishes like the Rock Shrimp Tempura [tossed in ponzu sauce or spicy creamy sauce] and the Black Cod Misoyaki [grilled black cod marinated in miso].

And our pastry area is very strong as well. 

So just keep things very simple. If you need a recommendation, feel free to ask your server or ask what the chef recommends and if we have something a little bit different. We’ll do a little flavor profile check of what you like and don’t like or if you have any allergies, and we’ll point you to something a little more obscure that you might not normally pick.

But if we can get your flavor profiles down, we’re really good at leading people in a way to make the experience as incredible as possible. [I can personally attest to this. My fianceé and I went in March 2023 and trusted the Umi team to curate our order, and each dish that arrived was better than the last.]

Because what we don’t really want is someone coming in and ordering something like a spicy tuna roll or a California roll and then judging us on just those two things, because that’s not the essence of what we do. 

I imagine so much of the quality of the dish comes down to the quality of the ingredients. Can you speak to that?

I spend a good 15% of my day just working on sourcing stuff, trying to get the absolute best product that we can possibly get. 

Anybody can pick up a phone and call a vendor to order a lobster, but we’ve gone through probably thirty different species of lobster or vendors for lobster, trying to find the exact perfect one that we use.

And that goes for every single product that we have, even down to the vegetables. If this carrot is phenomenally better than that carrot, we’ll only buy this one. That goes for the produce, the fish, the meat, the wagyu, the foie gras. We focus on trying to find the absolute best of the best. 

And then once you acquire the best of the best, you need to be able to give it the respect that it’s due. When I have a new but experienced cook coming in, they want to jump in straight to the heavy-hitting stuff, like breaking down the sea bass or the wagyu. And I tell them, no…we start with onions. Because you need to be able to master this simple little onion before you can get into the more expensive and higher-quality ingredients.

And the way that I teach this is with a saying: it’s a small series of perfections. 

So when you’re learning something, it’s one minor step. Let’s take the onion, for example. Can you peel the onion properly and perfect that? And then once you learn that, can you cut it properly? And we get it to where they need to master those things before they take the next step. 

It’s not gonna take a day. It might not take a week. And it might not even take a month. It takes a long time to start ingraining these procedures for excellence into how they’re preparing the ingredients.

And that’s one thing that I think a lot of people with experience discover when they first start coming in. On the first day, we’re not just creating new dishes and throwing them out there. We need to get the basics down to where they are so ingrained and perfected that after several months of doing something, they’ll look back and not even know when they perfected it. But now they’re just getting everything down and accelerating toward the process of doing something great. 

There’s no finish line, you just pick up more speed.

You pick up more speed, more speed. And even now where we are with the menu, we’re still picking up more speed.

And every day is a practice and we analyze everything and think about how we can do something better. At some point in time, we’ll look at every single dish on the menu and ask if it’s as good as we want it to be. And what in our minds is the ideal perfection of that dish? And what can we do to get it there? 

Is there a catalyst for this process of self-audit?

It’s a spontaneous thing where we’ll be looking at something and the second we get even a little apathetic toward it, it triggers. We’ll ask ourselves why we don’t really care about that dish anymore. Why doesn’t it excite us? What can we do to make it exciting again? And it’s that self-audit that we do all the time.

Could we cut this vegetable on this dish a little bit better? Could we marinate it for a little bit longer? Can we cook it in a slightly different way that would make it even better? Is the caramelization as perfect as we can get it? What about the sear on a steak? Are we using the perfect type of salt for that dish?

So you spend around 15% of your day sourcing, and obviously a decent chunk of your time focusing on refining the dishes…how else do you spend your time here?

Teaching and training. I’m not constantly roaming the dining room. I’m actually in the kitchen, cooking the menu with my team. And while I’m cooking with them, I’m always teaching. I’ll be watching one cook prepare something one way, and be like, “Okay, hold off right there. You need to add just a tiny bit more salt,” or “You need to get the pan just a couple of degrees hotter and do it this way.” This way they’re all learning and achieving excellence among themselves. 

The biggest compliment that I could ever have with my staff is if one day they became better than I am, that I’m teaching them so well that they’re excelling and their potential is exceeding where I am.

Do you have a particular favorite kitchen station to work at or a favorite dish to make?

When I first got to Umi, there wasn’t much of a saute station. We’ve been able to develop more of that and really expand what we can do in the hot kitchen. Now we’re creating dishes that are substantially more complicated but very popular with our guests.

I’d say the one dish that really changed a lot of things was the Butter Poached Maine Lobster Tail and Diver Scallop. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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We butter poach a Maine lobster and then we sear the scallop. So you have the two textures of seafood and then we combine it with a sauce made of sea urchin. And that’s become a very popular dish, but on the difficulty level, it’s astronomically high. I’ve had cooks who took seven months to learn how to make the sauce. If you even look at it the wrong way, it’ll break! And I’ve seen so much frustration with some of my veteran guys because the sauce is so difficult.

But that’s a process of them learning and of the restaurant evolving and pushing the limits. Whenever we’re trying to do something, we never want to take the easy way out. We want to take the right way. And sometimes the right way is the harder way. And that’s something I always preach to my guys: don’t take shortcuts, do it the right way. If it takes you a little bit longer, just do it the right way because that’s what our guests deserve.

What makes dining at Umi such a special experience?

It’s the excellence that we have in every aspect of the restaurant. 

When it comes down to the decor, the service staff, the management team, us in the back of the house, just trying to be excellent in everything that we do, and having that harmony amongst every department in every area. When we all work together to achieve a goal, we start to feel unstoppable because everybody’s working so in tune with each other. The end goal for all of us is to make sure that everybody who walks in that door has a mind-blowing experience, not just a good one. 

We want to start affecting how you look at food. We strive for the level of excellence where when you taste it, you have to be like, “Holy crap!” If we don’t get a “holy crap” out of a dish, it doesn’t get sent out.

Or another word instead of “crap.” Now can you tell me about the different categories of dishes you make here?

The most obvious difference is the raw versus the cooked. It’s almost evenly split. 

So with the raw, we have just raw, as in just pure sashimi [bite-sized pieces of raw fish with no rice]. Then we have the nigiri [small balls of rice smeared with wasabi sauce and topped with raw fish or other seafood]. But then we have stuff that is slightly cooked. And then we even have stuff in the sushi bar that’s fully cooked. 

And then we start getting into the kitchen. I invite people into Umi all the time who tell me they don’t eat raw. And I tell them they don’t have to. We can do everything for everyone, even when it comes to vegetarians. There was a point in time about last year when we started getting vegans coming in who were very adamant about coming into a Japanese restaurant and saying they don’t eat fish or meat.

And then we started doing vegan omakase [omakase translates directly to “I leave it up to you” in Japanese, and is most commonly used when dining at Japanese restaurants for the customer to allow the chef to choose what they eat] with nothing but vegan food in a tasty menu format at a very high level. Then I was having people coming back again and again and again.

How do you approach a vegan meal?

There are so many different little paths to get there. But when it really comes down to it, we’re always in search of umami, that fifth flavor. And that’s been our quest, whether it’s a vegetable dish or a protein-based dish, to always find the umami. When you taste it, it hits all those right areas and just gives your body a hug.

In order to get there, we use a lot of kelp as well as a lot of naturally-occurring amino acids like roasted tomatoes. We’ll roast tomatoes and then put them in a dehydrator and use that to really get the umami out. Or we’ll use mushrooms, both fresh and dried. In the past couple of years, I’ve been utilizing truffle. But I use it less for its flavor and more as an underlying umami element. We want to use just enough to provide the umami feeling without tasting it.

You’ve obviously had experience with all kinds of different cuisines, such as French, Korean, and of course Japanese. How specifically do those areas come into play with what you do here at Umi?

A lot. That’s where we get to the modernized part. One thing I don’t like hearing from first-time guests is when they see a dish and say it’s not Japanese. It may not be traditional Japanese, but all the aspects of that dish are Japanese: the object of most desire, the execution of every ingredient, the flavoring, and the Japanese techniques we use in the preparation.

But at the same time, when it comes to utilizing different cuisines, if you actually go to Japan, they’re all over the place in trying to innovate what’s new for Japanese cuisine. It’s the same thing with Korea and other countries that are doing the modernized version of their foods. They’re taking inspiration from other cuisines in order to bring it into their own and develop it, but at the same time, keeping the essence of that cuisine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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One example is we ferment our own kimchi in-house. That’s very much a Korean dish, but we utilize that with a Duck Tataki. This kimchi we have right now has been fermenting for almost 18 months, so it’s a very slow process and a very slow fermentation. But when you taste this stuff, it hits on a different level. And when we utilize this with Duck Tataki that we smoke, which is a Japanese technique as well, we twist it a little bit. We present it in a Japanese way, but it’s a modern Japanese dish.

And then we utilize other cuisines as well. Let’s take the Himitsu Roll, that’s only at Himitsu [Umi’s reservation-only cocktail lounge, located a few doors down] on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. 

That has a lot of Mexican undertones: there’s salmon tartare with dill and then we use a creamy salsa verde and top it off with cilantro and serrano peppers and lime, which are very Mexican. Then you also have the dill, which is more European. So we’re kind of playing around, but when you actually eat the thing, all the aspects of Japanese cuisine are there while utilizing inspirations from other cuisines.

Umi is coming up on a decade of being in business, and you’ve been here for over half of that. How have you seen the restaurant change since you joined?

When I first got here, the restaurant was busy. It was incredibly busy. And then as we progressed, and have been tweaking and adding to the menu and adding to the excellence of what we do, then we started seeing it get exponentially busier. Every year we’re looking at it like, how are we still getting busier? 

But at the same time, we’re adding staff and talent. And if that new person can add something to what we do, we’ll utilize that and develop how we can push the envelope, or raise the bar a little bit further, a little bit higher, and just do the best we possibly can.

So I’d say since I’ve been here, the food has been elevated, the skill of the staff has definitely been elevated, and I think with those, the overall dining experience has been elevated. 

What do you think lies ahead for Umi?

So ten years is a milestone in the restaurant industry and we’re very blessed to have made it this long. But we’re not complacent about where we are right now. 

The goal is always to push the boundaries, accelerate, get better, produce better food, produce what we have at a higher level, and then try to figure out what the guest wants. How can we impress them further and provide an even better dining experience to where somebody comes in here and says, “That was the best meal of my life”? I want that experience the next time you come in as well so we can take what we have and build upon it. The foundation’s already very solid, but we keep building upon it so the future is very exciting to us because we don’t know how high we can go.

And the journey of trying to get there is a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute process that we truly love. That’s why we come to work. We want to keep taking those steps, pushing further, and seeing where we can take this thing.

So you don’t see yourself slowing down any time soon.

I think Farshid and I definitely have that same motivation that we’re always starving for the next thing. And for both of us, it’s become almost all-consuming. It becomes like a compulsion. We’re constantly going and going and going and we don’t see the finish line. 

We’re always pushing to see just how far we can go, how many times around the world we can take this thing. You make it around the world one time, it’s not good enough. Let’s see how many times we can go.