On and Off the MenuA World-Class Omakase in America’s Most Landlocked StateUtterback has an in with Yamayuki, Tokyo’s top tuna broker, which “only deals to the Michelin guys.”Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara ShopsinSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyIt’s well-known lore, particularly in Omaha, Nebraska, that Warren Buffett—the ninety-five-year-old investor and philanthropist, who is also the city’s most famous living resident—usually gets his breakfast from a McDonald’s near his house. One inference that an outsider could draw from this information is that McDonald’s is the best restaurant in Omaha, good enough for one of the richest men in the world, at least. This is the sort of thing that drives the chef David Utterback a little crazy. Not far from Buffett’s preferred McDonald’s is an ambitious Japanese restaurant called Yoshitomo, which Utterback, who is forty-four and half Japanese, opened in 2017, in what was formerly a Subway. Right next door is Ota, a sleek eight-seat sushi counter where, once a week, Utterback serves something you might be surprised to find in America’s most landlocked state: a world-class omakase.On a recent Friday night at Ota, Utterback presented me and my fellow-patrons with the first of eighteen artful and inventive courses: tiny tarts, their crisp, fluted shells made from deep-fried nori, the iodine tang of the seaweed playing off a luscious filling of scallop carbonara, punchy with XO sauce and feathered with Parmesan. As he began to prepare nigiri, he offered a stern yet good-natured proclamation on the form. Each piece is meant to be enjoyed immediately, he explained—“Don’t wait for your dining partner, just live in the moment, be selfish”—and eaten as a single perfect bite. “You have been living life up to this point in the Multiple Bite Sushi Club,” he intoned. “This is your chance to do better. You can change. Life will be good.”An omakase, as with any tasting menu, can lend itself to preciousness: hushed, nearly tortured precision in the plating, obsession with ingredient pedigree. Utterback wasn’t exactly beating the charges. For nigiri made with tilefish that he’d flown in from Nagasaki, then dry-aged and cured in seaweed, he painstakingly placed a single shiso leaf on each piece, then used a rare Japanese weasel-hair brush to apply a layer of soy sauce infused with preserved cherry blossom. But he was also clearly driven by an exhilarating streak of rebellion. “All through the north and south of Japan, the construction of sushi changes,” he said, while serving something that resembled a meatball—fat, sticky grains of vinegar-seasoned rice flecked with chewy, briny bits of firefly squid, which glows a bioluminescent blue in Toyama Bay. “As long as you have sushi rice and literally anything else, it’s sushi.”On the stool to my right was Josh Foo, an Omaha-based food photographer and a friend of Utterback’s who told me that he’d recently recovered from a heart attack, a shock considering he’s forty-two, trim, and sprightly. “At the hospital, this nurse goes, ‘You’re never gonna have rice again,’ and I remember being, like, I’m Asian, don’t say that to me,” Foo said. From his hospital window, he could see the road that would take him to Yoshitomo and to Au Courant, a beloved farm-to-table restaurant across the street known for handmade pastas and scrupulously sourced local produce. “I unhooked myself from everything, and I went, I’m done,” Foo told me as Utterback listened, smirking. “I was going to come to Au Courant, come to Yoshitomo. I was just gonna eat as much as I could and die at the bar. And then I got caught, and they sent a psychologist to my room.”Many of the commercial strips in Omaha, a city of about half a million people, have the air of a nineties college town, with low-slung blocks of row houses punctuated by dive bars and cafés, thrift stores and record shops. If the city is known for anything, food-wise, it’s beef; from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, it was a hub of American cattle trading and meatpacking, home to one of the largest livestock markets in the world. The Reuben sandwich may or may not have been invented in Omaha (New York lays claim to it, too), and the city’s iconic restaurants are mostly steak houses, such as the Drover, a sixty-year-old Midwestern time capsule with a full salad bar and whiskey-marinated fillets.The sense that Omaha might be underestimated, even by the people who live there, is a source of both pride and torment for Utterback. We’d first met in Los Angeles, a city whose sushi doesn’t particularly impress him, a few months prior to my visit; he travels widely to meet other chefs and invite them to Omaha to eat and collaborate. “In Omaha—and outside of Omaha, too—there’s this assumption that, because something exists in a bigger city, it’s inherently better, right?” he said. He is quick to point out that he has an in with Yamayuki, Tokyo’s top tuna broker, which “only deals to the Michelin guys,” and that he began dry-aging fish—a process that enhances both flavor and texture—long before it was fashionable. “We’re out here blazing a trail, and every night someone will go, ‘This is definitely the best sushi in Omaha,’ ” Utterback said. “I don’t even get the state, the region, the surrounding Zip Codes! If we were in New York, if we were in L.A., people wouldn’t say, ‘This is good for L.A.’ They would say, ‘This is one of the best I’ve ever had.’ We never get that. No one’s ever tried to change it.”Utterback’s parents met on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where his mother was born and where his father was stationed with the U.S. Air Force. They settled in Omaha when Utterback was ten. Utterback’s mother, Hiroko Ota, took cooking cues from her fellow military wives; the family ate a lot of goulash, cottage cheese, and spaghetti, sometimes in a modified yakisoba. “She didn’t really make stuff. She just sort of . . . made stuff out of other stuff,” Utterback recalled. “Nobody was excited about dinner.” Special occasions, though, were almost always celebrated at Sushi Ichiban, a restaurant affiliated with the Unification Church, whose members are known as the Moonies. The Church’s founder, the Korean messiah claimant Sun Myung Moon, was largely responsible for popularizing sushi in the United States, driven by a belief that the seafood industry was a divinely inspired solution to world hunger.In his twenties, as Utterback dipped in and out of community college and played in punk bands—it’s not hard, even now, to imagine him in a mosh pit, with his buzzed hair and tattooed biceps—he got a job cooking at a restaurant called Blue Sushi Sake Grill. By 2014, he was the head chef of the restaurant group that encompassed Blue and had started to experiment with omakase as a side project. On a trip to Japan a few years earlier, he had eaten at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the Tokyo restaurant that would be made famous by the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” When Utterback told Jiro Ono and his son that he was a sushi chef from Nebraska, they laughed at him, but also agreed to his request for an internship—so long as he moved to Tokyo for at least three years, ideally a decade. Utterback, who’d just gotten married and bought a house in Omaha, instead devoted himself to learning on his own, poring over books, making regular trips to Japan, and befriending masters of the craft.In the years since, Utterback has often struggled to reconcile his culinary ambitions and the demands of the local market. In 2024, he jumped at the chance to buy Sushi Ichiban, which had been renamed Sakura Bana, and to upgrade it slightly, paring the menu down to its best-sellers and improving the quality of ingredients. But, when he raised the price of a lunchtime bento box from twelve dollars to fifteen, “everyone freaked out,” he said. “I got literal handwritten hate mail—on paper, put in an envelope, anonymously mailed—every week.” Within a year, he shut the place down, shouldering a huge loss. “I messed with everyone’s nostalgia,” he said. “I ruined their favorite sushi restaurant—and mine.”It’s easy to sympathize with the plight of the best sushi chef in Omaha. Utterback’s cooking is as sophisticated as what you might encounter at equivalent restaurants in New York or Chicago, a feat he pulls off without the infrastructure and specialized talent pool that you can find in bigger cities. He craves recognition and commercial success, yet he wants neither to leave Omaha nor to see the city change too much. About a week before my visit, the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting had flooded the city with deep-pocketed patrons, including a pair of “sushi bros,” Utterback told me, “very rich people who should have just been at a sports bar.” Instead, they’d booked seats at Ota, and annoyed the hell out of him by loudly sharing their raunchiest strip-club stories. “And, like, I have those, too,” Utterback said. “But, unless I tell you that, I have not told you that it’s O.K. to behave that way at the counter.”On my last day in town, Utterback and I stopped by Shredder’s, an irreverent pizza place that he was getting ready to open with one of his former bandmates. As he approved a pile of wall art—framed posters from early-two-thousands punk shows—I peeked at a rough draft of the menu, which included the DJ Rangoochi, a pie topped with crab and fried wonton-wrapper strips. From there, we walked to Koji, an izakaya that Utterback opened in 2022, where we sampled some of the menu’s most popular maki rolls, such as the Royale, a flamboyant concoction of spicy salmon, crab, and avocado topped with sambal salsa—the kind of thing that sells better than, say, firefly squid.Utterback’s initial vision for Koji was to showcase an array of superlative yakitori: behind the bar, a designated chef, one of Utterback’s few Japanese employees, was carefully tending a binchotan grill, basting bronzed cubes of pork belly in tare, a classic mix of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar, and rotating skewers of plump, smoky tsukune meatballs, to be finished with an egg-yolk sauce. “I thought people would be really excited about it,” Utterback said wistfully. He quickly learned that his customers didn’t share his enthusiasm. The yakitori is what he calls the “dog” of the menu, losing him money every day, yet he can’t bring himself to give up on it.“I just love it too much,” he said. ?