Love, Makoto – Restaurant Review

There is a Japanese phrase, “kokyou ni nisjiki wo kazaeru”, which roughly translates as “return home with glory”. It’s the phrase chef Makoto Okuwa had in his head when he came back to Washington D.C. to open Love, Makoto. On a recent trip to Washington, D.C to experience the city and review The Westin DC Downtown, we had time to visit Love, Makoto to experience their Omakase Express lunch menu.

Located off Massachusetts Avenue NW, this 20,000 sq ft Japanese food hall is unlike anything else in the city. Broken into four different dining experiences, all tied together by a long red hallway inspired by the torii gates of Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine. Dear Sushi specialises in omakase, celebrating both traditional takes on sushi. Beloved BBQ, a high-end yakiniku steakhouse with smokeless grills at the centre of each table where diners can grill their own Japanese A5 Wagyu and American-raised beef. Hiya Izakaya, a high-energy Japanese bar with whisky highballs and other inspired cocktails plus sake, beer and wine. Japanese bar foods on offer include skewers and bites prepared over a robata grill, and Love on the Run, the most recent addition, a fast-casual spot serving fried chicken sandwiches, ramen, sushi rolls, salads, dumplings, soba, udon, ramen and their famous heart-shaped doughnuts.

Chef Makoto Okuwa’s career started in Japan, where he spent ten years training under master sushi chefs from the age of 15 before moving to Washington, D.C. Here, he secured his first job at Sushi Taro in Dupont Circle, and a few years later, left to work with Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto. Chef Makoto would eventually assume the role of head sushi chef at Morimoto’s flagship in Philadelphia, as well as at his outpost in New York. Two years later, he fulfilled a lifelong dream of opening his own restaurant, Sashi Sushi + Sake Lounge in Manhattan Beach and then he went on to open restaurants in Miami, Mexico City, Panama, and São Paulo before coming full circle back to the capital. Partnering with restaurateurs Eric Eden and chef David Deshaies, who run L’Ardente (a favourite of Barack Obama’s) next door, Love, Makoto opened in 2023 in the growing Capitol Crossing.

Dear Sushi is a bright open space with light raw wooden furniture, almost Scandi in design, sitting against Prussian blue banquette seating which curves along one side. Vast linen shades hang above, while a sushi bar runs against the window.

Here it is all about the omakase; everything is thought out in precise detail, the menu presented in typewriter font as if perhaps an old love letter. Ceramic soy sauce dishes reveal a heart when they are filled. A set of iwai-bashi chopsticks dresses the table alongside a linen napkin, and a dish of ginger arrives with a quenelle of freshly grated wasabi sitting in ying and yang harmony.

We start with a lacquered box of edamame and a covered bowl of hatcho miso soup, the miso’s umami complexity leaving you craving for more. Two hand rolls are then presented on a wooden rack. The new and old school format, a signature of Chef Okuwa’s cooking, is virtually present in the white soy paper on the left and the classic nori wrapping on the right. The left filled with spicy tuna with jalapeno, wasabi, cucumber and soy, while the nori swaps a delicious baked crab filling and dynamite sauce.

Following this, sushi arrives on a single ceramic plate, eaten in a clockwise rotation, starting with Sakura tai snapper with kombu oil and sesame. Then King salmon with ponzu and sakura salt, finished with sesame. Bluefin tuna with soy marinade and wasabi, Hamachi with light soy and yuzu salt, topped with a confetti of citrus and dried flowers, and O-toro, a fatty tuna, finished with house soy and jalapeño koji.

Eating as a group, we also ordered a few dishes to share. The Hamachi with serrano chilli arrives as four thick slices of yellowtail laid out with rounds of fresh serrano on each. A spicy cucumber with shiso, the cucumbers smashed rather than sliced, dressed in chilli oil and sesame, topped with crispy shallots, dried nori. The zuke bluefin tuna with shiso ponzu, comes as four slices of soy-marinated bluefin in a shallow ponzu bath, scattered with pickled shallots, toasted sesame, shiso and tiny purple flowers.

The wagyu fried rice deserves a paragraph of its own, partly for how it tastes and partly for how it arrives. The bowl comes to the table looking austere, diced wagyu arranged in a ring around a trembling onsen egg, the whole thing buried in katsuobushi flakes. The server then mixes it in ceremonial fashion, folding the egg through the rice and meat until the whole thing becomes something richer and more yielding than the sum of its parts.

The lunch closed with cherry creamsicles, served still frozen on a wooden board, cherry blossom at dusk in colouring and drizzled with frozen berry coulis.

Final Thoughts

Dear Sushi is open 11 am–2 pm and 5–10 pm daily with Omakase priced at $85 per person, $45 for lunch and à la carte items ranging from $6–$45, correct at the time of writing.