River Park in Fresno has a new sushi spot with gold leaf, dry ice and upscale details

No more burgers, airplane decor or old-timey gas pumps.

A prime spot in Fresno’s River Park that was once home to Brooks Burgers and World Sports Cafe has been transformed into something entirely different. Now it’s a high-end Japanese restaurant with modern cuisine, trees climbing the walls and calming botanical murals

O-iza Modern Japanese opens to the public Wednesday — and is something completely new for Fresno.

It’s upscale sushi and Japanese food, with glimmers of something extra: gold leaf atop sushi, prime Wagyu beef cooked at your table, and sushi and caviar served on a bed of black pebbles teeming with dry ice.

It’s the type of restaurant owner Jason Lin visits in places like Tokyo and Taiwan.

“The No. 1 thing is I want to bring something different to Fresno,” he said. “There’s no really nice, high-end exclusive, special-occasion restaurants that have Japanese cuisine.”

Reservations are strongly advised and can be made via ExploreTock.com.

Lin has tweaked the restaurant’s dishes to appeal to Fresno’s tastes.

He knows the local customer base through his other restaurants. This is his third in River Park, having opened Spicy J’s Specialty Chinese Cuisine and J Pot Mini Hot Pot & Bar.

His family-owned company also launched Hino Oishi and two Ramen Hayashi locations, and runs Lin’s Fusion, the Asian buffet on Blackstone Avenue.

Lin said he was motivated to launch O-iza after seeing local restaurateurs open Saizon. The modern, upscale Napa-meets-Mexico-City restaurant at Shepherd and Willow avenues opened in late 2022.

“I’d see what they’re doing and it inspired me to do something high-end,” he said.

Since River Park didn’t have a sushi place after Yoshino closed its north Fresno location (the Blackstone and Bullard avenues location is still open), Lin decided to open one — with his own twist.

The food

The menu is about 50% sushi and 50% everything else.

There’s lots of uni — sea urchin — on the menu. Executive sushi chef Shiyong “Elvis” Wei’s favorite is the uni nori, made with uni, raw tuna, nori (seaweed) tempura, caviar and that gold leaf.

Wei would stay up to til 4 a.m. testing different sauces at the Hino Oishi kitchen trying to get everything on the O-iza menu just right.

“Here, we make it different than regular,” he said. “It’s very unique in Fresno, very special.”

There’s a surf and turf made with raw Wagyu beef and jumbo shrimp. A pasta, almost like a carbonara, is made with uni and a Japanese twist. And there’s bone marrow soup.

An appetizer expected to be a favorite is the A-5 Hot Rock. It’s made with Wagyu beef (A-5 is best quality of Wagyu there is). A small grill is brought to the table, where the beef is cooked on a large black hot rock atop the grill.

For people wanting something a little more familiar, there’s the hibachi section of the menu (a reference to the grill the food is cooked on) that includes chicken, a tofu and vegetable dish, and garlic butter lobster tail.

Finding sources of many of these ingredients was a challenge, Lin said. Much of it is flown in from suppliers outside the country. That includes oysters from Canada, and amaebi, a large shrimp flown in from Japan that’s still alive when it gets to O-iza’s kitchen.

Though that could lead to astronomical prices, Lin said he’s trying to keep the menu affordable. Most entrees range from $26 to $49.

A collection of sake, Japanese rice wine, is available, ranging from $15 a serving to an $180 bottle. Cocktails made from sake, wine, beer and mocktails are also on the menu.

O-iza doesn’t mean anything specific in Japanese. Instead, it’s a combination of names of restaurants from Lin’s past. Osaka was the eatery where he trained as a teppenyaki chef, and Izakaya was the first restaurant he opened in Fishers, Indiana with his dad and uncle when he was 18.

He combined their names to get O-iza.

“I always remember where I came from,” he said.

For now, O-iza is open from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, and until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Lunch hours are coming soon.

Two patios are also in the works. And the front of the restaurant will soon look completely different, with a wall so customers enter from the sides and lots of plants and greenery.

“It’s more rewarding to bring something back and do something that nobody has really done in Fresno,” he said. “I grew up in Fresno. We’re very proud to be from Fresno and local.”

Details: O-iza Modern Japanese is at 190 East El Camino in River Park. Visit ExploreTock.com for reservations.