Kisser, a Japanese comfort food restaurant, opens this weekend. Here's what to expect.

Kisser, a Japanese comfort food restaurant in the style of a kissaten, or casual neighborhood cafe, will open this weekend after two years of planning, construction and pop-ups in local restaurants. Chefs Brian Lea and Leina Horii, a married culinary couple, will open the restaurant at 747 Douglas Ave., in the Highland Yards Development in East Nashville, at 11 a.m. Saturday. Here's what you'll find when you visit, and what you need to know before you go.

Answers have been slightly edited for brevity.

What does the name mean?

Horii: Kisser can mean "Pow! Right in the kisser," or slang for mouth. And also because we're a married couple, that's the romantic part of Kisser. But more directly, it's a Japanese word for a traditional neighborhood cafe, the kissaten.

What is a kissaten?

Horii: It's a word that's very nostalgic for Japanese people. Before the rise in the popularity of things like Starbucks and western-style coffee shops, the idea of the Japanese cafe was as a neighborhood spot where you could read the newspaper and drink a cup of tea and eat comfort food and just hang out.

Now, it's a type of restaurant that's becoming harder to find because of the popularity of Starbucks and grab-and-go places. I remember going to places like that with my grandparents. There's so much nostalgia involved in the kissaten for me, and in the type of food that we do.

What will be on the opening menu?

Lea: We're taking inspiration from what we've done with our pop-ups. (There will be) small plates and sharable things, including chirashi, which is basically rice in a bowl with a variety of seafood and pickled vegetables on it, and inari, or fried tofu skin stuffed with sushi rice with shrimp salad on top.

Horii: Inari is very old school. It originally was made for Japanese Shinto shrines as a temple food, offered to the god of the foxes. Shintoism has a lot of deities and the fox god apparently likes fried tofu.

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Lea: We always want to have a fresh noodle dish on the menu, and that one changes with the season based on how warm it is outside. We're opening with a version that's a hot Japanese curry soup.

Horii: It's basically a combination of a garam masala and a Madras curry style. In contrast to what a lot of people think, Japanese curry is milder, almost like a gravy. People who say they don't like curry usually like Japanese curry. It's finished off with grated apple or honey to add a little sweetness.

There's a lot of buzz surrounding your restaurant. How did you get here?

Lea: We first started doing the Patterson House pop-ups out of necessity after realizing we had a lot of time, and that the build-out was going to take longer than we expected. We wanted to get our names out there, and (the feedback) was way beyond our expectations.

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Why do you think Nashville is so ready for this type of food?

Horii: We're just trying to fill the gaps in Japanese cuisine that are not being represented here. There are so many sushi and izakaya and ramen places doing a great job, but there's also a lot in between that's been sort of hard to find.

What will the hours be?

Lea: Just 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays, and we're hoping to add dinner service on weekends once we get our feet on the ground.

What else will be coming down the line as you stay open longer?

Horii: Since we started off with our pop-ups, we would love to use the space for pop-ups for other chefs to test out their own concepts. So many people let us use their space, so we would love to help cultivate the next generation of chefs who are trying to create something by being hosts to them.

How many seats? Will you take reservations?

Lea: We'll have 40 seats when we're able to engage the hallway more, but for now it's around 30ish to 35 seats in the space.

To begin with, we'll only take walk-ins, and we'll be using an online waitlist you can add yourself to when you come in. We want to make sure we maximize how many people we can feed in a small restaurant in a small amount of time.

What are you most excited about in getting this open?

Lea: Having a permanent space after being this roving pop-up for two years. I thnk we're also really excited to be finally open and cooking the food we want to be cooking. It's been fun seeing everyone enjoy the food as much as they already have.

More about Kisser at www.kissernashville.com.