The Ethiopian restaurant Addis NOLA and the sushi bar Yakuza House are two very small spots that have made an outsized impact. Now, each has embarked on expansion plans. Here’s what’s in store:
Addis NOLA’s next move
Prince Lobo gets fired up just greeting the day. Check out any of the videos of him stepping outside his family’s Ethiopian restaurant Addis NOLA (422 S. Broad St., 504-218-5321) to proclaim the daily fresh start and you get a feel for the fashion he brings.
Lately, he's had some extra spark, with big plans now taking shape.
The tiny restaurant by the corner of Tulane Avenue and Broad Street will soon move to a much larger location on Bayou Road.
Addis NOLA will take over the former location of Cajun King, a buffet restaurant at 2514 Bayou Road. It is slated to open in October as renovations progress; Addis NOLA remains open at its original location in the interim.
The move will double the restaurant’s capacity and will add amenities like a full bar for cocktails and casual dining, and a coffee ceremony stage, a designated area for the aromatic ritual of coffee roasting that Lobo now showcases in the dining room.
The move will also put Addis NOLA in the midst of a historic corridor with many other Black-owned hospitality businesses and a diversity of other small operators.
“I just think that being part of that corridor is big for us,” Lobo said. “It’s our vision to continue building the community.”
Building bridges in hard times
The need for a larger location was spurred by moves Lobo and his family made during the pandemic.
It was his mother Biruk Alemayehu, a professor at Southern University at New Orleans, who started the restaurant in 2019. After one year in business, the pandemic up-ended everything. But through the tumult, Lobo pursued collaborations with other restaurants and businesses around the city, striking the tone of solidarity and also introducing more people to his family‘s traditional flavors. Addis NOLA also became a familiar presence at local festivals.
As business began picking up the spring, the impact of all that work showed up with many new customers coming to their door. Sometimes a long wait for a table could ensue.
“We’re going to be able to do more for guests and get more creative with what we bring to them," Lobo said. "And as a mom and pop, this is creating more opportunities for our team.”
The core menu will continue, including a range of stir-fry and stew dishes imbued with berberé, a heady blend of garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander and other spices that is a signature flavor of Ethiopian cooking.
Many are served over injera, the bubble-pocked, stretchy, crepe-like flatbread. The essential delivery system for many Ethiopian dishes, injera traditionally takes the place of utensils — you tear up bits of it to get after those meat and vegetarian dishes.
Lobo said the new location will give Addis NOLA a chance to expand the menu, and also develop a setting more evocative of Ethiopia.
“We want to make this space feel like we’re transporting you to Ethiopia,” he said.
Collaborations will continue, including a block party to debut the new restaurant space at its opening this fall and a series of dinners with guest chefs. That includes Serigne Mbaye, creator of Dakar NOLA, a Senegalese pop-up and communal dining concept, who was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Emerging Chef award, a national honor.
To develop its bar, Addis Nola is working with Turning Tables, the local nonprofit that consults with the hospitality sector and is working to increase equity for people of color in the bar and spirits business.
“They do amazing work, we think we can make that a beautiful addition to our business,” Lobo said.
Yakuza House doubles down on Metairie
Chef Huy Pham started his first restaurant Yakuza House in Metairie last year with just a handful of seats and a tight focus on hand rolls, a sushi bar specialty.
Many people encouraged him to expand, and often they’d plead the case for a location in their own neighborhoods, especially around Uptown New Orleans.
Instead, the chef is doubling down on Metairie in a way that will greatly expand the restaurant’s capacity.
Work is underway for a new home for Yakuza House at 2740 Severn Ave. The new location is about a mile from the original location (1325 Veterans Blvd., 504-345-2031), and is close to the Whole Foods Market.
Pham expects to open here this fall, perhaps in October. Yakuza House will remain open in its original location until Aug. 27.
Rooms to grow
The new location, which was previously a Voodoo BBQ restaurant, is about 4,200 square feet. As the new Yakuza House will feature three distinct rooms.
The main room will have a hand roll bar with 16 seats (compared to six seats now), and also an array of booths. The izakaya room will be a lounge with Japanese-style bar snacks, including meats and seafood cooked over a robata grill. On the weekends this will keep somewhat later hours until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. The third space will be the omakase room, for a chef-led dinners and private events.
“The menu will absolutely grow now that we have more room,” Pham said.
That will include the robata grill dishes, ramen noodles and more cooked dishes from the kitchen.
But hand rolls will remain the centerpiece, as they’ve been since Yakuza House first opened last year.
The hand roll is a quick hit, the impulse bite of the sushi bar. It’s just seafood and rice with something extra bundled together in seaweed and, traditionally, handed over the counter to the diner.
Today, hand rolls have become a full-blown trend, with dedicated hand roll bars opening in many cities, and this has been registering in New Orleans too. July brought the debut of the hand roll bar Sukeban on Oak Street.
Pham comes from a Vietnamese restaurant family. They once had a pho shop called Nam Do on the west bank and later opened the fusion restaurant Hip Stix in the Warehouse District (both have long since closed). But Pham decided to build his own career in sushi. He’s worked around the city and had a tenure in New York.
Opening his own restaurant meant starting small, given his start-up finances. Pham credits the Jefferson Parish Economic Development Commission with helping him make the leap and keep the plan moving through the pandemic. That’s one reason he wanted to keep Yakuza House in Metairie as it grows.
“A lot of my customers are from Uptown, but Metairie has been good for us,” he said.