Shinobi Sushi Bar & Grill
“I’m born in Vietnam, but I always worked in Japanese restaurants here in Utah.” Ken Cuong Gip’s story begins in Ho Chi Minh City, in a family that ran an ice cream shop. He remembers the rhythm of school days, soccer after class, and the occasional help at the shop packing kilos of ice cream for street sellers and loving the daring flavor of durian, a fruit native to Southeast Asia. At home, he cooked now and then with his mom and great-grandmother, and he taught himself fried rice just because he loved it. That simple plate became his first signature dish on his way to becoming the chef and owner behind the Japanese restaurant, Shinobi Sushi Bar & Grill.
In 2001, after a long family-reunification process that took nearly two decades, Ken arrived in Utah at seventeen. There was a year of high school, a couple of semesters of college, and then the path that would shape the rest of his life - restaurants. He started at his uncle’s place in Sandy, Teru Sushi, and soon after joined Teppanyaki, rotating through locations for nearly sixteen years. He learned both sushi and the griddle side of the craft, building speed, knife skills, and an eye for detail.
Just before COVID, his sister asked for help opening Sake, her restaurant in Sandy. Ken refined sauces, tuned the sushi menu, and spent a year and a half shouldering long days that taught him what it takes to run a place end to end. It became a proving ground. He had already fallen in love with Japanese cuisine, but at Sake he perfected recipes, built systems, and felt the grind and pride of ownership. The thought of having his own restaurant turned into a plan.
In 2021, a friend showed him an empty space in the Marmalade district. "It had four brick walls and nothing else." Ken could see it. He designed the layout, chose the colors, planned the open kitchen, and kept adding details as the build went on: high ceilings, blue leather banquettes, marble countertops, live plants, ocean-pattern wallpaper, and a constellation of lanterns that warms the room at night. A stunning sushi bar anchors one side, where guests can watch the master at work. Eight months later, at the end of December 2021, Shinobi Sushi Bar & Grill opened its doors.
The food carries the same care. Fresh fish arrives three to four times a week, and Ken checks every order himself, sending back what does not meet his standard. Tuna from Hawaii; salmon from Norway or the Faroe Islands; yellowtail and aji from Japan. He breaks down the fresh fish with the unhurried attention he has honed over decades. The menu moves from clean sashimi and maki to a long list of special rolls, and then to hot dishes that echo his hibachi years - flavorful salmon, chicken, ribeye, and filet cooked in front of diners.
Nearly every sauce is made in-house. There are more than twenty, including a bright ponzu, a gentler low-sodium soy, a glossy vegan “eel” glaze, teriyaki tailored for grill and a separate version for sushi, plus dressings and dips for tempura and salads. Broths for udon are simmered from scratch. Vegetarians and vegans find real choices: stir-fried vegetables, tofu add-ons, vegetable tempura, soy-wrapped rolls with crunchy pumpkin and avocado, and simple maki that let rice, seaweed, and produce speak plainly.
Behind the bar, shelves hold Japanese whiskey, gin, and vodka, alongside an evolving list of sake that includes hard-to-get bottles brought in by special order. There is even jelly sake in cans, a playful counterpoint to the more serious pours.
People often ask why a Vietnamese-born chef chose to open a Japanese restaurant. The honest answer is that this is where he trained and where his professional mastery lives. But the Vietnamese heart is there, woven through his memories and his home cooking. He has weighed how to introduce it at Shinobi without losing the clarity of the Japanese menu. Someday, he would like to offer noodle soups and a few small bites, or test Vietnamese dishes as specials. He wants to do it the right way, with the same standard he brings to sushi.
Shinobi is a family endeavor. Ken and his partner, Bri Barros, have worked side by side for years. Bri grew up in Utah, a dancer with a tight-knit family, and found her way into hospitality early. While attending Dixie State in 2012, she took her first sushi-house job as a hostess and fell in love with the food and the atmosphere. She made the choice, however, to come home to care for her mother who had suffered a stroke and then had years of autoimmune complications. After she was able to nurse her mom back to health, Bri went on to build a front-of-house career that moved quickly - assistant manager by 2013 and later head server at Teppanyaki in 2016. That is where she and Ken met. As they tell the story, it was colleagues who insisted, long before the couple saw it, that they would be perfect together.
Bri is the front-of-house backbone at Shinobi and, when needed, she steps on the line. In the early years, they worked seven days a week, often thirteen-hour shifts, sometimes running the whole place by themselves when staff called in sick. They scrubbed walls after the contractor fell short, stayed until two in the morning doing dishes, and learned to rely on each other the way only small-business owners understand. Today, they are raising two children together, with Ken’s older son living in California. Although still young, Bri says that the children already know the feel of the dining room and the rhythm of service. “Hard-work ethics attracted us to one another, now I just want people to see how passionate we are. I will forever be Ken’s little cheerleader.”
Four years in - at the end of 2025 - the economy has been a headwind, but the dream has not dimmed. Ken still arrives early, still checks every fish, still tastes sauces, still fine-tunes the room one thoughtful change at a time. He envisioned this life long before there was a name on the door. Now he stands in the dining room he imagined, listens for the quiet hum of a good service, and counts the small wins that add up to a life’s work. Ask him if it feels like a dream realized, and the answer lands without decoration: “For sure, 100%.”
