Austin restaurant Kemuri Tatsu-ya has won the number eight spot on Bon Appétit’s “Hot 10,” the magazine’s list of the best new restaurants in America for 2017. The line-up was released on Tuesday and will be featured in the September issue of the magazine.
The ramen/barbecue shop garnered recent attention from Texas Monthly barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn, who wrote: “And so the ramen shop became an izakaya, Japan’s version of a gastropub, and the smoker they’d inherited [from a previous occupant of the space] became the workhorse for what Tatsu would describe as ‘a Japanese immigrant’s conversation with Texas barbecue.’” (The word kemuri means smoke in Japanese.)
In a press release, Bon Appetit restaurant editor Andrew Knowlton summed up the magazine’s new top-ten list, and Kemuri in particular: “Fun. That’s the one word that defined this year’s best new restaurants. Fun food, fun vibe, fun experience. And at no place did I party more than at Kemuri Tatsu-ya in East Austin. . . . chefs Tatsu Aikawa and Takuya Matsumoto . . . first won us over with steaming bowls of noodles at the nearby Ramen Tatsu-ya, a Top 50 restaurant in 2013. At Kemuri, their cooking has a fearlessness to it . . . In a town filled with migas breakfast tacos and barbecue on every corner, Kemuri stands out for not playing it safe. Who knew that trailblazing could be this delicious—and fun.” Bon Appétit editor Julia Kramer also helped compile the list.
Kemuri was the only Texas restaurant to make the final cut, though Austin restaurant June’s All Day made Bon Appétit’s list of the best fifty new restaurants in the country.
