Remember earlier this summer when I crowned the chopped wiener as Chattanooga’s most iconic dish?
I compared its obscurity to Spam musubi — the strange, Hawaiian step-cousin of Japanese onigiri. It’s absolutely my favorite snack, and I’ve long accepted the fact that my chances of eating it in Chattanooga were as Jay-Z put it, “slimmer than that chick in Calvin Klein pants.”
This was all before Kai Bisto set up shop and saved the day. Kai Bistro is at 625 E. Main St. in Chattanooga (423-531-4098).
Usually, Pan-Asian inspired restaurant concepts end up bending and eventually breaking under the enormity of Asia. Furthermore, “fusion” restaurant concepts are typically conundrums of saag paneer enchiladas, General Tso’s chicken pizza and other trifling hybrid foodstuffs I have too much dignity to mention.
Kai Bistro flirts with these two concepts but doesn’t fully commit. Fortunately, the shot-callers were wise enough to know that attempting to paint all 49 nations in Asia with one brushstroke is futile. Kai Bistro narrowed it’s influences down to a handful of nations — the popular ones: Japan, China & Korea — and stayed far away from the others like Cambodia, Bangladesh and the Philippines. However, they did include Hawaii as a bonus, hence the Spam musubi I mentioned earlier.