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All about the bird Chef Mitsuo Endo unveils a new specialty yakitori restaurant By Brock Radke his is not the best time to open a new restaurant. The typical challenges have become intense, to say the least, and those obstacles don’t include the threat of being ordered to close if dining out is deemed too dangerous by the state government. But chefs and restaurateurs are like artists—they need to create. It’s ingrained. And in some ways, the pandemic has created a different kind of fuel for their fire. Mitsuo Endo, the James Beard Award nominee whose inimitable influence on the off-Strip dining scene began with the spectacular Aburiya Raku in 2008, unveiled his latest concept on July 3 with Raku Toridokoro, a yakitori restaurant dedicated to chicken. It’s located near the Palms in the intimate space where Endo opened Tatsujin X, a unique take on teppanyaki, last year. He has replaced Tatsujin’s flat-top grill with a robata, upon which he’s skewering and charcoal-grilling every part of the bird you can imagine … and some you probably can’t. Toridokoro is something new for
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Endo and for Las Vegas. Some of those new restaurant challenges don’t apply to the chef, who helped develop Las Vegas Chinatown as a must-visit dining destination for locals and tourists through the original Raku and the dessert wonderland Sweets Raku, which he opened with pastry chef Mio Ogasawara in 2013. “I didn’t have a plan for this,” he says, speaking through an interpreter, about his success and expansion in Las Vegas. “I was surprised. Compared to when I first [arrived] and now, the overall restaurant quality is
Chicken skewers being prepared over hot coals
