A French-Japanese Experience
Porte rouge is French for "red door"; hana (花) is the Japanese word for "flower." Only a few blocks of downtown Missoula separate the two restaurants that carry those names, and their chefs have been walking that distance, in both directions, to eat.
Yuriko Hagen's regard for Walker Hunter's cooking goes back to the Pearl Café on East Front Street, a dining room she loved in the years he cooked there. When the Pearl closed and Walker reopened its kitchen as Brasserie Porte Rouge, she found her way back to the same address, now behind a red door. Walker, for his part, had long since become a familiar face at Sushi Hana, back when it still stood on the corner of Higgins and Pine.
Missoula is still the kind of town where the chef whose food you admire turns out to be a regular in your own dining room, and after enough dinners on both sides, two chef-owners start to wonder what they might make together.
Last year, they found out. The idea was Yuriko’s: she had long admired Walker’s craft and wanted to work with him. Together they shaped the evening and called it East Meets West. It was a memorable night for everyone involved. Guests filled every seat, so of course we had to ask him to come back. Sunday November 15th, Walker returns to Hana for the second East Meets West.
The Chefs
Yuriko grew up in Hakodate, a harbor city on Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, and she first learned to make sushi at her mother’s side. She came to Missoula in 2002 and took a job washing dishes at Sushi Hana, which Chris Nagata had opened in 1998. She worked her way from the dish pit to the sushi bar, the traditional path for a sushi chef in Japan. In 2015 she bought the restaurant herself, becoming its taishō (大将), the chef-owner behind the counter. In 2025 Hana relocated to the Wilma Building, next to Caras Park alongside the Clark Fork River, renovated the former Scotty’s Table space into our new home, and became simply Hana.
Walker spent seven years in the Pearl’s kitchen before he and his partners opened Burns St. Bistro on the Westside. When the Pearl’s owner retired, he bought it, renovated it, and reopened it as Brasserie Porte Rouge. French cooking lives on at the same address. In 2024 the James Beard Foundation named him a semifinalist for Best Chef: Mountain.
Between them, Yuriko and Walker have spent more than four decades in Missoula’s professional kitchens. Most nights you’ll find Yuriko behind the sushi bar at Hana and, a few blocks away behind the red door, Walker in his kitchen.
Neighbors
Local restaurants share the same winters, the same regulars, and the same long, quiet stretch between the last summer visitors and the first ones of spring. A dinner like this is one of the few ways two owners can lend each other a hand. Guests of each restaurant meet the other’s cooking, and two chefs who have known each other’s food for years work side by side for a night.
The move to the Wilma gave Hana something the old corner at Higgins and Pine never had: a kitchen and a dining room large enough for guest chefs. Bringing local chefs in, and putting their cooking in front of Hana’s guests, has been a goal ever since. This October, Scott Gill returned for a second Scotty’s Hana, and in November, Walker returns for a second East Meets West.
French & Japanese food
French and Japanese cooking have borrowed from each other for more than half a century. French chefs who traveled to Japan in the 1960s and ’70s came home with new ideas about restraint and the look of a plate, and Japanese chefs have trained in French kitchens for generations. The two traditions also start in the same place: a carefully made stock, a fond in one kitchen and a dashi (出汁) in the other. Both cook by the season.
The Dinner
If you know one of these restaurants and not yet the other, consider this an introduction. Reservations open now first to our email subscribers and will open public later. Details to follow.
