With its flattering lighting, wide pine-wood bar, and soft, red leather chairs, the little room is surpassingly stylish, and the same goes for Ichimura himself, who doles out his impeccable omakase menu nattily dressed in a traditional Japanese yukata. But what distinguishes this pricey new restaurant ($300 for the full chef’s-choice dinner, prepaid, before a drop of champagne or sake passes your lips) from the rest of the gilded new crop of sushi palaces around the city is the recent addition of the sushi-only six-seat Ash Room, where dinner costs a little over half the price of chef Nozomu Abe’s expertly presented full menu next-door (cod milt soup, anyone?) and allows you a taste of the elegant, beautifully sourced nigiri portion of the omakase experience without breaking the bank.Īfter wandering in the proverbial desert for a short time following the unfortunate blow-up of his eponymous project down in Tribeca, one of the city’s great masters of the edomae style has found a properly palatial home at this discreet, big-money tasting-room complex on Eldridge Street. Few restaurants have managed this theatrical trick in quite such an elaborate and convincing way as this polished little atelier on the Upper East Side, with its white stucco façade, kimono-clad wait staff, and hushed little rooms constructed without nails in the ancient sukiya style. It’s always been chic, in New York’s high-end sushi circles, to trace your lineage back to the old masters in Tokyo. Here are our current favorite destinations for a pure sushi fix, which we humbly present for your debating pleasure, with the usual caveats that the last sushi dinners one has had (Sushi Noz and Ichimura, in our case) have a way of lingering foremost in the mind, and that it always helps, in the realm of big-city sushi, to have an expense account or a high-roller friend (or two) in tow to foot the extravagant bill. This is especially true these days, when a new, younger generation of chefs from Japan is opening restaurants around town, and some local sushi aesthetes we know are beginning to whisper that in terms of the variety of styles and even in terms of quality, New York might actually be beginning to rival Tokyo itself (which, to be fair, generally boasts only the traditional edomae style ). In the world of high-end, big-city dining, few subjects elicit more passion and contentious argument than the delicate, subjective, ever-changing realm of first-class sushi.
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