Leopard Lounge Restaurant food picture from Palm Beach Post Eats. Don’t fall in love with places/spaces because you will probably end up somewhere completely different, and much better than you would have expected.īuccan serves inventive American cuisine in the form of small plates, flatbreads, large plates and signature cocktails. Imoto features sushi, sashimi, dumplings, tempura, and fire-grilled selections. Palm Beach Post Eats helps you find the best restaurants near you. I know personally that the lure of owning your own place can sometimes cause you to make bad decisions. There are a lot of people out there preying on chefs who haven’t been given the right business advice. Sloan’s (here in WPB) Cookie Dough Cookie and Red Velvet Cake by Ben & Jerry’s are my current favorites.Īny advice for local aspiring chefs or restaurant owners? My guilty pleasure is ice cream at the moment. What is your food crush / guilty pleasure of the moment? Either way, it usually takes a good amount of tweaking and tinkering and re-plating before I am happy with it. Sometimes it’s a flavor combination that I taste or read about and find interesting, or sometimes it’s an ingredient that I want to use and highlight. What is your process for creating a new plate? Inspired by Buccan next door, Imoto expands Chef Clay Conleys small plates. The small plate type of dining allows guests to enjoy a variety of different flavors in one seating. In Japanese, the word Imoto means little sister. 7:00 PM Back at the restaurant, usually do a quick line check, trying to taste most of the. After 3 or 4 bites of a large plate I am bored. Co-Owner & Executive Chef, : BUCCAN & IMOTO PALM BEACH. When I go out to eat I like to try a lot of different things. Imoto Sushi Palm Beach is a sushi restaurant in West Palm Beach. Why are “small plates, big flavors” your preferred dishes? It was also important to offer our guests a vastly different experience from buccan. Designing a concept with a focus on Asian flavors was a natural move I had spent a lot of time in Japan, Thailand, China and Southeast Asia and fell in love with the flavors. Imoto came about when the adjoining store on South County Road became available. So, our team visited the island, loved the space, and the rest, as they say, is history… He had been eyeing the space for some time. Clay Conley, Chef/Owner, Buccan, Imoto and Grato. After several attempts in Miami, my business partner, Piper Quinn, proposed we look in Palm Beach…at our current location. We asked our West Palm Beach Food Tour chefs, area chefs and restaurant owners where they like to eat. Even as a young line cook it was the kind of place I knew I wanted to open. Buccan has been in “development” for quite some time, 15 years or so.