Austin Chef Turns At-Home Omakase Service Into a New Restaurant

Austin chef Michael Carranza is turning his private and pop-up omakase business into a full-on restaurant in North Austin this year. Tare — in physical form — will open at 12414 Alderbrook Drive in the North Star neighborhood, as reported by Austin Business Journal, in the fall of 2023.

The physical Tare will feature an intimate space with 10 seats and the plan is to host two to three services in the evenings. The restaurant will remain in Carranza’s kappo-style, which is a Japanese term for omakase serviced in a less-than-expected-casual way with, yes, nigiri, alongside other cooked forms of fish and proteins.

The owner of the Alderbrook Drive property, Jeff Abel, asked Carranza if he’d be into opening a restaurant at the address (Abel invested in one of Carranza’s previous workplaces, the now-closed She’s Not Here). and he said yes. When the restaurant opens, Carranza will pause his private dining services for the time being, but he plans on restarting those and pop-ups at a later time.

Currently, Carranza is also the co-owner of Texas Sushiko, a food truck that serves open-faced hand rolls, with co-owner Danielle Martinez. And actually, the two are working on opening a physical location of the food truck within the host site Texas Sake. He also recently did an omakase dinner event using delta-8 infusions in April.

In 2020, Carranza also had been the co-founder of the Hawaiian-Asian restaurant Salty Cargo and Mexican seafood truck Aye Carranzo, both with chef John Gocong, and both seemed to have closed in 2022. The two also opened at-home omakase service Osome also that same year, but Carranza left to open Tare in the summer of 2021. His other previous work history also includes Austin Japanese restaurants Uchi and Musashino

Similarly, another omakase at-home and pop-up Hush is looking to open a physical restaurant; chef Phillip Arellanes paused the bookings.

Rendering: Point B Design