Kansas City has no shortage of sushi restaurants, but in the past couple of years, the standard has been raised. Hand roll bar, Kata Nori, is credited for this elevated sushi evolution, reinvigorating the old guard as locals have known it. At this hip and cozy Crossroads establishment, guests sit shoulder to shoulder around a U-shaped bar where the fish is cut, seasoned, and hand rolled in front of them. Diners who reach for soy sauce do so mistakenly. With the highest quality fish, often sourced from Japan, the food is prepared to create a balanced, perfect bite where fresh flavors aren’t overpowered.

For guests who are used to hand rolls with cooked fillings and bold sauces, it’s a different way to eat sushi.“Everything is seasoned and dressed already,” said Chef Bass Pham. “If you have extra soy sauce, everything will begin to taste like soy sauce. You don’t really taste the quality of the fish.” Bass, who is also a partner at the restaurant, developed Kata Nori’s menu. His two decades of training in Japanese cuisine has produced a unique interpretation of sushi as Kansas Citians know it. The food follows traditional preparations with a mix of unexpected cross-cultural flavors. 

Being Vietnamese, Bass didn’t expect his career to take him into Japanese kitchens. He initially studied education before later changing his major to radiology. It was during this period that he was introduced to the art of Japanese cooking. “Sushi was never a long-term goal,” he said. “Going to college, I worked at a sushi restaurant and began to understand Japanese culture. I fell in love with it.”

In Bass’s view, Japanese food is more balanced than many other cooking styles, where flavors often lean too salty or too sweet. He trained under Japanese chefs who adhered to traditional methods for teaching understudies. As a result, he spent years repeating the fundamentals. It was a slow, repetitive process that required a lot of patience. 

Many years into the process, Bass was finally entrusted with core elements of the craft. “You wash the rice for a year to three years,” he said. “It took me six years before I touched fish.” At first, he followed instructions without understanding the reasoning behind the methods. Eventually, he began to ask questions and think more critically about the process. Exploring the basic underpinnings of Japanese cooking changed his approach to the work and how he teaches his understudies.

Before opening Kata Nori, Bass worked in restaurants alongside Japanese chefs in multiple cities, including Houston, Denver, and New Orleans. Every chef had their own style and expectations, and this gave Bass a variety of references to draw from. Over his two decade career, he has helped open multiple restaurants and develop menus. In Austin, he worked as the lead chef at Uchi, where every team member understood the food and treated service like part of the craft. “The food and how well they train the staff just blew my mind,” he said. “They knew the menu inside out. They were really professional about it.” That experience set the bar for how thoroughly a team should understand the menu and how they show up for guests. 

Even with his diverse hospitality experience, it took more than 20 years before Bass opened his own restaurant. He was initially asked to consult on the concept for Kata Nori by longtime friends, Nam Phan and Kyung Kim. At the time, he was traveling back and forth from New Orleans to Kansas City while also developing his own Omakase concept on the side. As the restaurant opening approached, Kata Nori’s original head chef chose not to move forward. That’s when Bass stepped in to develop the menu and began working at the restaurant full time as a partner in the business.

His impression of sushi in Kansas City was that much of it followed the same formula where rolls are built around sauces and familiar flavors, rather than the fish itself. Thus, he saw an opportunity to bring something different to the local sushi scene. Kata Nori’s menu focuses on hand rolls and crudo. How the food is prepared and the quality of ingredients set the restaurant apart. “We carry good quality sushi, the best I can get here,” Bass said. Guests who are unfamiliar with sushi, or wary of raw fish, are eased into the experience by Bass and his team. “I start with the blue crab hand rolls first,” he said. From there, guests move on to other options. “The next popular one is the hamachi hand roll,” he said. As diners get more comfortable with the food, they are more willing to try different preparations. 

The U-shaped bar creates the perfect atmosphere for interaction between chefs and guests, as well as between diners. “The reason we did a U-shaped bar was to make it feel very communal,” Bass said. Guests can see what others are eating. They can ask questions and talk to people sitting next to them. “You get to interact with everyone around you,” he said. “We want to make it feel like a community.” The design is common in parts of Japan and in larger cities, but was new to Kansas City when Kata Nori opened.

Since opening, Bass believes the restaurant has had an impact. “I think we really helped elevate the sushi game,” he said. This is a nod to the number of new sushi and Omakase-style restaurants that have opened in Kansas City in recent years. Kata Nori is expanding with a second location in development near 119th Street. The new space will provide more square footage and a full kitchen that will allow Bass to expand the menu and introduce a wider range of Japanese cooking to Kansas City. “I want to introduce old school Japanese cooking, but with a new school twist,” he said. That includes items like yakitori and soba, alongside the restaurant’s existing menu of hand rolls and crudo.

Looking back, Bass sees a career that unfolded in ways he never could have planned. What started as years of painstaking repetition in Japanese kitchens never pointed to this outcome. Bass didn’t set out to own a restaurant. He stayed committed because he loved the craft. “Everything kind of happened for a reason,” he said.

Featured in the May 30, 2026 issue of The Independent.

By Monica V. Reynolds

Photo Credit: Moe Jabr