Bringing premium and authentic Nikkei cuisine to a global audience in exciting and modern-fine dining restaurants that entwine art, entertainment and music, Chotto Matte offers a unique dining experience that fuses Japanese and Peruvian food. Here, RLI sits down with Founder and Owner Kurt Zdesar to discuss the concept and how the brand is looking to grow in the years to come.
The idea behind Chotto Matte was born out of Founder and Owner Kurt Zdesar’s love of Nikkei cuisine that was discovered during his time travelling across Asia and South America. Wanting to offer this cuisine on a global scale, he believed the experience needed to be offered at a more accessible price point and from here Chotto Matte was born and has never looked back.
A fusion food whose popularity is sweeping across the globe, Nikkei cuisine is all about quality, ingredients and flavours. Chotto Matte cares about where its food comes from and how it is produced. All of its ingredients are natural, locally produced and made with no artificial flavouring.
“We opened our first site in Soho, London back in 2013. The idea was always to refine and develop the concept before expanding further so we spent the next five years doing exactly that before opening Chotto Matte Miami in 2018 and Chotto Matte Toronto in 2019,” explains Kurt Zdesar, Founder and Owner of Chotto Matte.
“Many people saw the pandemic as a reason to pause business activity but we actively sought to expand and secured deals to take Chotto Matte to Doha in Qatar, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Dubai in the UAE across 2021 and 2022 respectively. The expansion has been exciting and we’re currently touring the US looking to sign up as many as four new locations.”
As the weight of the coronavirus pandemic has been felt in the last 12 months, the company has adapted with it and focused on reactive changes and reconfigured how they operate. Always wanting to add more vegan dishes to their menu, this ended up becoming a large part of what they were doing in the kitchen at the start of the pandemic. When it became apparent this was a longer term solution, they evolved this idea to develop recipe kits for their customers to enjoy at home.
They then became the first in London to offer a video instruction guide alongside their recipe cards and the success of this led to a virtual cooking experience where Kurt and the Executive Chef would setup Zoom calls and guide viewers through a unique menu tailored to this experience.
“These past 12 months have shown us that we have a huge following and people were ready to climb over walls to get to us. During the brief times we were able to reopen the business the locations would fill up immediately and this was a very humbling experience,” says Zdesar.
A dynamic business, Chotto Matte is more than just a restaurant and in times like these the concept thrives. Given the heavier restrictions on entertainment venues and night venues, they offered a comparable experience in a food setting which really helped to draw in large crowds.
“From DJ’s, live cooking and mixologists on show, everywhere you look in our locations we provide something for our customers to see. We aim to create an atmosphere that takes you away from everyday life which is more important than ever given the reality of our current situation,” Zdesar explains.
As a huge fan of travelling and experiencing new cultures, Zdesar is keen to find partners in many locations where he feels the brand would work. He feels locations such as India, Mexico, China, Singapore, major European cities and parts of North America are places of interest for the brand at the moment.
Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of change for better, is in the brands DNA. The business is always improving and Zdesar believes customers are loyal because of this and the value on offer at Chotto Matte locations. They have a genuine offering, real Nikkei cuisine, real materials; it is a product that has been ten years in the making.
“Driving down costs, understanding margins, carefully selecting partners and deals, market research, managerial controls and mechanisms, taking from learning and sharing the varying experience of our teams are the key drivers behind our success to date I feel,” says Zdesar. “We spend a lot of time with our key staff members reviewing the business and making key decisions in the way that we feel is best for the business.”
Building a fast-growing business presents many challenges, to counter this, the key people at Chotto Matte, Kurt included, are moving into different locations around the world to assist in managing the business globally so they can ensure new teams are trained before they regroup.
“The restaurant business is a combination of the dining experience – fine dining, casual, fast – the design, the service and for me ultimately and most importantly, the food. It is a difficult business and every single ingredient has to be right or the recipe does not work,” Zdesar concludes.
