How Chef Seth Fatah is Rewiring Pan-Asian Dining at Kaori Miami

By Eric Barton | Oct. 21, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Seth Fatah didn’t have to go far to find his first cooking mentor. He was sitting across the table from him as a kid back in Kuala Lumpur. “Yeah it was my dad,” Fatah says. “He often did not follow recipes, just trusted his instincts. Everything he made had this quiet care to it as like he was speaking through the food.” The lesson landed early: cooking is a language, not a script.

Fatah has taken that lesson in building his first restaurant, Kaori in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood, which combines the chill vibes of a vinyl listening room with a stunning dining room with skyline views. Kaori has earned the attention of the Michelin Guide thanks that lesson he learned many years ago, his dishes composed with intention, even when they take risks. After a recent meal there, I spoke with Fatah to figure out what’s behind this 25-year-old chef, clearly a rising star who’s had a quick upward trajectory to running his own kitchen.

Chef Seth Fatah

Walking into Kaori, you pass through the listening bar where couples sink into couches and a DJ spins vinyl, then climb to a dining room wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass. We ate grilled mushrooms with a porcini–pasilla glaze and charred tomato; dry-aged duck with five spice; a hot pot threaded with vermicelli; and a shokupan sando with strawberries and cream. Some plates landed neatly; others reached further. It all felt like a chef willing to take chances, dishes that looked like nothing I’d had before.

Fatah’s backstory begins in the capital of Malaysia. “Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, I was immersed in one of the world’s most vibrant and diverse food cultures,” he says. “In KL, we cook by instinct—what we call agak-agak—guided by feel, not by measurement.” That instinct sits under his training: a base layer of street-market speed and spice memory that informs how he builds flavor, even when the technique is strictly modern.

Seared fish with turnip and amazake puree

There was a moment when cooking switched from habit to a career. “Yes, it was a crudo… using beet skin trims to wrap the fish,” he recalls. “That was the first time I realized that food could do something. It could shift the energy in a room.” The dish mattered less than the reaction. He wanted to design more of those shifts.

Five spice dry-aged duck

Shiro ponzu crudo

Miami did not erase Kuala Lumpur so much as give it a new dialect. “I didn’t want to recreate Malaysian food exactly as it was. I wanted to bring the soul of it,” he says. “Things like the deep funk of fermented shrimp paste, the heat of sambal, the brightness of citrus or torch ginger.” He folds those ingredients into local seafood and produce.

When he’s working on a new dish, he does not begin with plating. “For me, it almost always starts with flavor memory,” he says. From there, structure takes over. He talks about French discipline as architecture—acid used like a scalpel, fat as ballast, texture as movement. “There should be softness and crunch, warmth and chill… something that keeps your palate curious.” It is the difference between complication and balance.

The room’s design and sound are part of the method. “The atmosphere downstairs sets the rhythm for what happens upstairs,” Fatah says. “When the room feels alive, we lean into that—maybe we go bolder with acid, sharper with texture, or looser in plating. Downstairs gives us the beat. Upstairs, we cook it.” The point is not volume. The point is tempo.

Mille-feuille of candied kelp

What emerges is a chef negotiating memory and modernity in real time: Kuala Lumpur in the background, a father’s voice in the foreground, and a Brickell restaurant trying to keep both in frame. Kaori is not a finished statement. It is a young kitchen speaking clearly enough that you want to hear where the sentence goes next.

Strawberry sando