Daotian Ryori is the most well-known Japanese restaurant in Chongqing, which opened at the end of 2014, and was the first to take root in Chongqing earlier than Fujiya and Kitayama, and was once evaluated as the Japanese restaurant with the freshest ingredients and the highest per capita ingredients in Chongqing. Today, Daotian has five branches in Chongqing. Doda has added an American twist to traditional Japanese cuisine, making the original simple and light Japanese cuisine bright and gorgeous, which is popular with young diners who like to try new things.
Mike, the founder of Daotian, is a Japanese chef with many years of experience. In 1989, he studied Japanese cuisine under Japanese chef Masae Ohara, and later ran a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, USA. After returning to China, he ran Daotian in his hometown of Chongqing.
As the first mid-to-high-end Japanese restaurant to appear in Chongqing, Daotian made a lot of innovations in the Chongqing Japanese restaurant circle in 2014. Twice a week, tuna, salmon, sea urchin, oysters and other seafood are directly sourced from foreign suppliers, making it the first Japanese restaurant in Chongqing to focus on fresh ingredients. Daotian uses "chilled" technology to transport ingredients, compared with "frozen", "chilled" preserved ingredients can better retain the original structure and flavor of meat, although today, "chilled" has become the most common way to preserve ingredients in seafood restaurants, but in Chongqing that year, Daotian was the first. It is worth mentioning that the Doda sashimi platter is presented in a way that does not spread ice, which shows that Doda is confident in his own ingredients.
With the experience of founder Yang Meng opening stores in the United States, Daotian's Japanese food style is more American. American and Japanese cuisine focuses on fancy, and one of the most representative dishes is the California roll. The use of avocado instead of sashimi, crab meat, cucumber, and seaweed in the middle of the roll became popular and is now a category of sushi. Michida's American-style sushi rolls are gorgeous and have a wide variety of toppings, such as caterpillar rolls, tree of life rolls, and playboy rolls. Compared with traditional Japanese cuisine that focuses on taste and minimalism, the contrast between the two is great.
The decoration style of Daotian Restaurant is more modern, rarely Japanese-style, without too much sense of ceremony, and the dining experience is more relaxed and casual. Due to the high popularity of the restaurant, it is inevitable that the environment will be noisy during the peak dining period, and the phenomenon of children running around will occur from time to time, and the reception level of the waiter will also decrease. In addition, with the continuous expansion of new stores in recent years, the pace of menu production, staff training, and store management has lagged slightly, and negative evaluations of Daotian have begun to appear.
