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When chef Niki Nakayama opened N/Naka a decade ago on the corner of Overland and Lawler in the Palms neighborhood of Los Angeles, she regularly served fewer than 10 people each night, even though the kitchen and dining room could handle four times as many. She distinctly remembers serving just two diners during a particularly slow service in those early days, when restaurant patrons were more enamored with pork belly and molecular gastronomy than in refined Japanese tasting menus. Still, she persisted, fueled by an unshakable sense of joy for her craft and duty to traditional kaiseki philosophy. “It never occurred to me that we were not going to make it. For the first time in my career I just felt this incredible sense of belief in what I was doing, and I would find a way,” she says.