• Michael Gebert
  • Scott Malloy

People are always on the move in the restaurant business, and I’ve known plenty of chefs on the way up. But there’s something different about the moves made by a cook named Scott Malloy, who currently works at Momotaro’s izakaya. A Tennessee native, Malloy didn’t have Japanese food till he was nearly an adult, but he’s made up for lost time by being obsessive about it ever since. That’s been reflected in a career driven less by where he could boost his salary and title, and more by where he could learn the next thing about the cuisine he loves. Next year he plans to take his first trip to Japan, with his wife Becky, office manager at Grace, and the couple is working on eventually living there for a time. The ultimate goal is, yes, his own restaurant, but for now he’s more determined to learn everything he can from others than to run the show himself. I met him at Star Lounge (hence the coffee beans in the background) to learn more about how he’s driven his career to satisfy his obsession with Japanese cuisine—and what he plans to do with it someday.

When was that?

Did you find a sushi place where you could get some experience?

I did a tasting for them, and initially I didn’t get the job. They chose somebody else. That guy wound up taking a job somewhere else, so they called me back and said, “It’s yours—do you want it?”

That was around the time that B.K. left, and we really focused on doing yakitori at that point. I always had a fascination with chickens, a lot of which came from being a southern kid and growing up with uncles who raised chickens. Obviously fried chicken is a staple, but I’d had a lot of badly done fried chicken. So I was like, how do you take chicken and make it something really special? But through Japanese food, yakitori was how you do that. There’s Michelin-starred yakitori, and it’s done with finesse and it’s about what breed the chicken is and where it’s sourced from and what the chef’s sauce is. That was where the focus on tradition really started.

At first when I heard what Boka was doing I thought it was going to be like Japonais, a fusiony type thing. Then I heard that Mark Hellyar and Jeff Ramsey were going to be the players, and I said, OK, these guys are the thing. The fish that they get in is better even than what I saw at L2O. The selection is . . . ridiculous, and there’s such a focus on not being huge, not being what everybody thought it was going to be. To me, it’s really, really cool that they did a big restaurant like that—it’s huge—and say, we’re not going to do that [be fusiony].