From 2024
George Kaiho keeps mighty busy. After working for 8 years at Jettison, he now spends most nights behind the bar at Le PasSage, the new Katy Trail restaurant from chef Bruno Davaillon. He also occasionally shows up to take orders or work catering for the best Thai restaurant inside Dallas city limits, Ka-Tip Thai, which is owned by his wife, YuYee Sakpanichkul Kaiho. Now he has a third business: Ookuma Japanese Burger, which taps into Kaiho’s childhood memories of Japanese food the way that Ka-Tip draws on Sakpanichkul’s Thai heritage.
For now, Ookuma keeps things simple. During my three visits over our hot late summer, George Kaiho was running the business himself. His kitchen is the former Sandwich Hag space in the Cedars, and, as in the Sandwich Hag days, this 1964 building doesn’t accommodate much. The kitchen is on the inside, and the dining room is a shaded, sheltered patio with brightly colored tables and lots of cheery pink. Orders are placed on a tablet at a pickup window. (There’s no phone, and the tablet doesn’t print receipts.) Around the corner, a second window is home to Chimlanh, the breakfast and Vietnamese coffee shop run by former Sandwich Hag owner Reyna Duong and her crew.
As fall and winter patio weather gets more attractive, Kaiho might recruit more help to keep up with burger-seeking customers. But because of his evening job mixing cocktails, he was keeping Ookuma a lunch-only operation, Wednesday through Sunday, at the time of writing. He was also keeping his menu as concise as restaurant menus get. Three styles of burger: teriyaki, Tar Tar, and tomato, each available with multiple patty options. Four snack baskets, all fried: chicken, veggie croquettes, takoyaki, and fries. Add a side salad and a slice of cake, and you’ve tried everything. You can order the entire menu, leave a nice tip, and come out under $120.
“It’s like American food in Japan,” Kaiho says of his recipes. “If you go to Japan, if you go to MOS Burger or McDonald’s, you can eat a teriyaki burger. It’s a really popular thing. It’s not a traditional food culture, more of a pop food culture.” In Japan, teriyaki burgers are usually made with pork, or sometimes a pork-beef mix; these were the burgers Kaiho ate growing up. He has added an all-beef version to appeal to Texans. The Ookuma menu captures cultural influences in action. If you order the beef burger here, you’ll get an Americanized remix of a Japanese riff on an American food. How’s that for fusion?
The Ookuma space is small enough to allow for experimentation. Texans will try almost anything if it’s on a burger.
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On my first visit, I tried the chicken burger and was rewarded with one of Dallas’ messiest meals. You can’t eat this one-handed. In fact, you can’t eat it without a mountain of napkins, since the breaded chicken cutlet is topped with a generous scoop of house-made tar tar sauce loaded with chopped egg. Somehow, the chicken retains its crispy coating underneath the deluge. The sauce poured down my fingers to my wrists, until it looked like I had slaughtered a cream-blooded animal. You’ll want to hose down afterward, but it’ll be worth it.
Only one burger in Dallas is as messy as that one, and it’s Ookuma’s tomato burger. This, Kaiho told me, is the signature menu item at the chain MOS Burger, which has more than 1,000 locations in Japan and hundreds more in Asia and Australia. Kaiho’s version starts with a meat patty, chopped raw white onions, a thick slice of tomato, Kewpie mayo, and a toasted bun. So far, so simple. But then he cooks down a sauce that starts with an Italian soffritto—carrots, celery, onions—and ends with chopped tomatoes. It’s a chunky sauce, gently sweet. It complements the burger in a very different way from, say, the savory intensity of a smash or a slice of bacon.
I have another low-key favorite: the vegan burger. Made with pea protein, the patty replicates the color and irregular texture of a burger made with freshly ground beef. Along with a wedge of lettuce and some thin pickles, Kaiho adds a secret weapon: a whole lot of his soy-forward teriyaki sauce. This, for me, completes the illusion of meat, adding the umami note that might be missing otherwise.
Kaiho’s teriyaki burger technique—whether you order beef, pork, or vegan—is to cook the patty on a flattop, then simmer it to the finish line in a pan with his teriyaki sauce. After the burger has absorbed some of the sauce, he places it on the bun and then drizzles over a thicker, more concentrated teriyaki reduction.
Yes, teriyaki sauce might spill all over your fries. Guess what tastes good on fries?
Those fries are thin and crispy, sometimes even crunchy, tossed with enough salt to keep you in iodine for a few days. The inspiration might be from McDonald’s, but with just a little longer cook. (Why not copy the best?) You’ll be thankful for the crispier texture if you order the “sumo fries,” a basket topped with cheese, green onions, bonito flakes, and furikake seasoning, with its mix of roasted seaweed, sesame, and spices.
If you order Ookuma’s takoyaki—the fritter with a nugget of octopus in the center, almost like a Japanese state fair food—give it a minute before you start eating. The batter is practically molten inside its deep-golden crust, and it can fall apart under your fork or burn your tongue. A side salad is a cursory nod to the existence of green vegetables, but I won’t be coming to Ookuma for a balanced diet. If I want a veggie, I’ll go for the fried potato croquettes, shatteringly crisp on the outside, mashed on the inside, and flecked with bits of pea and carrot.
This fall’s restaurant openings in Dallas have gotten bigger, bolder, and more expensive with each new Instagram reel. The all-American bar and grill with an extra bar hidden in the back; the Uptown Latin restaurant with upcharged margaritas and a grand entryway designed for influencers’ videos; the businessman who says he spent $20 million on his new steakhouse and further claims that he doesn’t care if he makes the money back.
So why take a moment to salute a one-man show that revolves around a small handful of burgers served through a takeout window? Even a small business—especially such a small business—can upset the narrative that’s building across Dallas. To get anything interesting done in the restaurant business now, that narrative goes, you need millions of dollars, a bankable “concept” you can take to investors, a few signature cocktails, and probably steak frites.
Ookuma Japanese Burger is in many ways very lucky. Kaiho is a veteran who understands the business and holds himself to exacting standards with both his food and drinks. Duong has been a mentor figure to a number of Dallas chefs and is gracious about sharing the spotlight. In turn, she credits a landlord willing to try new things. The Ookuma space is small enough to allow for experimentation. Texans will try almost anything if it’s on a burger. And, of course, Ookuma’s chef has a second job.
That’s all true. But it’s equally true that a walk-up window that serves $10 Japanese chicken burgers and octopus fritters is the kind of thing that’s “not supposed to work” in Dallas. Sitting in the pink glow of this Cedars patio, watching other customers order Vietnamese coffees and waiting on a vegan teriyaki burger, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, in Dallas, the realm of possibility is more expansive than we imagine it.
This story originally appeared in the November issue of D Magazine with the headline “Stand and Deliver.” Write to brian.reinhart@dmagazine.com.
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