Chef Katsuji Tanabe Finds a Loving Home Base in Whittier

(Gerry Furth-Sides)  We are so pleased that Chef Katsuji Tanabe has found a home.  We met him when he was owner-founder of Mexi-Kosher from our days in the Pico-Robertson area where he was about the only restaurant owner always willing to partner or participate in neighborhood events.  And we saw him as a generous contributor at events, such as Planned Parenthood Food Fare each year.

Signature the NIXON CHoPS & WHISKEY bottled Habanero hot sauce, like the chef, is very spicy but its a warm heat not prickly

Previously restless and pretty much unappreciated for his novel Mexi-Kosher kitsch niche he created in Los Angeles almost a decade ago, theambitious Chef Tanabe has since earned a name for himself on national TV.   More recently we wrote about him being in an LA TIMES  Food Bowl pop-up, at the  Chimney Coffee‘s weekly “Japanese-inspired breakfasts” for dinner series, where the chefs were identified by their restaurants (Ted Hobson, Jet Tila, Wesley Avila, Octaavio Benitez, Esdras Ochoa) and where he was identified as Top Chef’s Katsuji Tanabe.

So it’s fitting now he has now found an appreciative home in Whittier, even if to keep up his national presence he is not always in it.  His presence is still felt the moment you want in the door and see his portrait and chef coats.  Now that’s more like it.

The first thing you see entering the NIXON CHOPS & WHISKEY

Chef Katsuji Tanabe has partnered with Whittier based Inspired Dining Group, who transformed the long-running Seta restaurant in Uptown Whittier into a popular neighborhood steakhouse albeit “with a slight Mexican accent,” as it says in the notes,   beautifully integrating “a few culinary flourishes from his travels around the globe.”

Born and raised in the heart of Mexico, the son of a wealthy Japanese father and a Mexican mother.  As a young kid he always loved to cook, but his father, who was a mechanical engineer, always wanted him to have a “real career”.  At 17 years old his parents divorced and he moved to California with his mother and sister, where he experienced a drastic change in lifestyle. He went from “riches to rags”. Still determined to get a career in the kitchen, got his first job as  restaurant dish washer.  He worked his way up the ranks until he reached the calibre of Bastide and Maestro’s.   In typical fashion, Chef Katsjui seized an opportunity at Shiloh, a kosher restaurant in the Pico-Robertson area, to learn everything he could about the kosher kitchen and started his own version of it.

“This restaurant is the culmination of my many years of travel,” says Tanabe. “All of the television productions in Mexico, Charleston, Chicago, New York and Boston have afforded me an extraordinary opportunity to learn alongside a wide range of talented chefs and restaurateurs.” A fan favorite from his three appearances on Bravo’s Top Chef television series (Mexico, Boston, and Charleston), NIXON is the fourth restaurant in Tanabe’s budding empire, including Mexikosher Los Angeles and New York City, and restaurant Barrio in downtown Chicago.  Not only is he a successful restaurant owner, renowned chef but is married with two young daughters.

The NIXON serves as Tanabe’s home base, where he will be found evenings he is in town, cooking for and personally greeting his guests. “Meeting  the new Nixon ownership proved to be a stroke of good luck for us all.  Whittier provides a large and appreciative audience, as well as the opportunity to cook the foods that I love most, the foods of my heritage. This city offers the magic of a close knit community that every restaurant hopes to earn and to serve for many years. The city has embraced us, and I feel extremely fortunate to now call this beautiful city my home.”