Dining With Purpose
Chiba has been open in Westfield’s up-and-coming restaurant district since 2017 and is still a premier destination connecting guests to culture and experience.
With its guiding commitment to support and connect the community, Chiba has been providing guests with handcrafted meals prepared with the freshest ingredients in a welcoming environment for people to come together and celebrate life and life’s greatest moments.
“We want to be there for those moments for people, big or small. We want to make people feel better walking out than when they walked in. We want to take care of people. When you take care of people, they remember that, and they remember not just the food and the service but the way that we treat them. That is extremely important to me and to my family and the way we do business. In our family, in our culture — my wife and I are Italian — food and family are the cornerstone of everything that we do,” says Keith Dusko, owner of Chiba.
Chiba is a “family business serving families,” and taking care of his guests like family is very important to the essence of its success.
“It’s a very personal business, more important some days than even the food and the service. Just taking care of people each and every day is the core value of our restaurant concept. I hope guests feel the fact that we care and we care about their experience, their view and the way they feel. It’s everything,” Dusko says.
Chiba has four separate guest areas: the main restaurant house, the back bar building, a covered stage area and a large patio area with mature trees and draped Edison bulb lighting for a vacation-inspired ambiance and aesthetic. Dusko says, “The stage area where we have live music and the patio for summer, there’s no better place to be.”
Dusko refers to these areas as Chiba’s different energy zones that are designed with the needs of the clients in mind.
“There’s different areas whether it’s sun or shade or indoor or out or bar or dining room or the stage area. There is a little something for everyone and occasions or different types of feelings or what people want for that evening,” Dusko says.
The menu at Chiba is filled with authenticity and craftsmanship, with a bar menu including sake and tropical cocktails, and a food menu featuring fresh fish flown in from Hawaii, Japan and Southern California, innovative sushi, hot entrees and more. Selecting all their fresh ingredients and sourcing handpicked vegetables, Chiba ensures that guests are receiving only the best quality and authentic dishes.
“My mentors told me there’s four principles to making a great Japanese restaurant: crafting all of our sauces from scratch, filleting our fish on-site, preparing our sushi vinegar rice in-house, and picking all of our vegetables ourselves,” Dusko says.
The menu remains a source of inspiration and ingenuity.
“The menu continues to evolve 16 years later. We continue to try to innovate and try to create to make the menu spontaneous, sometimes fun. Food is meant to be fun — you eat with your eyes first — so we always try to create dishes that visually look appealing as well as taste great,” Dusko says.
Looking toward the future and the developing restaurant scene in Westfield, Dusko says that he hopes Chiba will continue to establish its place by serving great food to great people.
“I hope we continue to grow, and we’ve been around a long time, and we hope to be around a long time still, but we have to earn our place every day with every dish, every customer and every piece of sushi,” Dusko says.
Enjoy Chiba’s daily specials that include Tuesdays Kids Eat Free, Wednesday is happy hour all day, Thursday is 50% off bottles of sake and wine, and Fridays and Saturdays feature live music from 6 to 9 p.m.
Chiba is located at 228 Park St. and is open for lunch Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 2 p.m., and dinner Tuesday through Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 4 to 9 p.m. For more information, including their different menus, visit their website at chibaindy.com.
