SELECTED SUSHI BARS WORLDWIDE:
A GLOBALIST’S GUIDE
Australia | Bosnia | France | Japan | Spain | California | New Jersey | Pennsylvania | New York | Texas
AUSTRALIA
Yoshii Ryuichi was born in Japan, and ended up a sushi chef in Australia because it was easier to get a visa there than in the United States. Let us count the ten or so courses of the chef’s “Yoshii Course” on our inventory of the benefits that flow from keeping a welcoming posture towards immigrants. In his restaurant in the Rocks near Sydney Harbor, Yoshii’s touch with complicated, prepared dishes — an egg coddled with Tasmanian uni; barramundi steamed with mochi; seared scallops with sour plum, truffle oil, and grapeseed oil — is incomparable. Ryuiichi has a sushi “cookbook” to his name, and the nigiri course is wonderfully heavy on Aussie fishes: ocean trout instead of salmon, a lean, taut Hiramasa yellowtail in place of oilier northern hamachi.
115 Harrington Street, Sydney, NSW. (61) 02.9247.2566.
BOSNIA
Karuzo
The chef at this Italo-Mediterranean seafood place learned how to make sushi from a book, but one happily makes accomodations on issues of technique given the location for such an experiment in pluralism: directly adjacent to the Sarajevo market the Serbs brutally shelled in 1994. Karuzo is a creature of post-siege Sarajevo, its tentative cosmopolitanism sustained on the dollars and euros of the foreign diplomats, NGO-crats, and military types who sustain the local economy. In a charming dining room resembling a ship’s galley, the gregarious chef Sasha uses delicious Adriatic seafood — octopus, shrimp, bluefin — for his nigiri. Sadly, the rice beneath suffers, but it’s easy to make up for the lost carbs with one of the satisfying pasta dishes that round out the polyglot menu.
Mehmeda Spahe bb, Sarajevo.
FRANCE
Isami
Paris is mad for sushi, but most of it isn’t worth the trouble. The neighborhood Vietnamese traiteurs seem to have all swapped out their summer rolls for maki, and places that advertise themselves as sushi bars seem focussed on hawking the chicken brochettes they insist on calling yakitori along with side orders of salmon sashimi. That’s the fish that local diners seem to want above all, and when they get tuna they seem to take fashion over flavor. (“In France, they want the color red; if it’s red, they want it,” says Jaques Ouleveque of Reynaud, a seafood wholesaler at the Rungis market, an echo of the nineteenth-century Japonisme often reduced to little more than a red-lacquered sheen on furniture.) Yet on the Ile St. Louis, directly abutting the Seine, finds a reliable, solid sushi bar without Parisian pretense or style. A surly chef doesn’t seem much for chatter with his customers, but with the right spot at the bar, you can blank him out and imagine instead the deferent service at Tour D’Argent, glimpsed just across the river.
4, quai d’Orléans, 4th arrondisement, Paris. (33)1.4045.0697.
JAPAN
Sushi mogul Takamasa Ueno mastered the mid-price chain sushi bar with dozens of locations across Japan; new outposts in Dalian, China, and Vancouver, Canada; and grand plans for further expansion in both China and North America. But all of them carry signature flavors of Ueno’s native Miyagi prefecture, best tasted at the flagship location in downtown Sendai. There’s a tapas-style dish of octopus suction cups sautéed in oil, lemon and salt, and a namero scramble of horse mackerel in miso paste. From local ports come large, creamy Sanriku oysters and whale meat, which in sashimi form is a noble competitor to a more familiar carpaccio. “Do you know where Greenpeace gets its money?” Ueno asks, conspiratorially. “The American meat industry. They know that if whale is promoted, beef consumption will decrease.”
Kyubei Sushi
Opened in 1936, Kyubei was serving sushi indoors to seated diners when most of the city was grabbing it on the go from street vendors. It is today perhaps the place Tokyoites name most frequently if you ask them where to find the capital’s best sushi — and where Ryu Hashimoto took Bill Clinton (an American president who didn’t have any problem keeping this Japanese dinner down). Kyubei brags of having invented gunkan-sushi, the style of wrapping seaweed around rice to create a bucket necessary to contain plasmatic toppings like uni and ikura. After a meal here — continuously conjuring the crunchy tang of daikson, shiso, and plum-sauce sandwiches, or the memory of a live botan-ebi shrimp still squiggling on the tongue — the only reasonable letdown might be a soak in one of the last public baths in downtown Tokyo, conveniently just a few doors down. It’s as close to a night in the old Ginza as is left. (Note that it is often spelled “Kyubey,” as well.)
Ginza 8-7-6, Chuo-ku, Tokyo.
Sushi Dai
Tsukiji will likely close down before consensus is reached on which bar in the inner market is best. The seemingly obvious indicator — the longest lines — appears to reflect not quality or even likeability, but instead which shop has been most recently featured during one of Japan’s incalculable hours of TV food programming. Our favorite seems to be Sushi Dai (although Daiwa Sushi has always been good, to,), not least because they — unlike one other Tsukiji shop — have always been welcoming to a diner with a notebook, and never told us we weren’t allowed to write about them. (Fair warning for all good Tsukiji eating: get in before the noxious but increasingly popular “Japanese only” policy takes hold.)
Tsukiji 5-2-1, Area 6, Chuo-ku,Tokyo.
SPAIN
Shiratori
It’s easy to tell Sapporo’s standing in the constellation of Madrileño sushi joints by its location: near the Japanese embassy in Nuevos Ministerios. Shiratori has been there for a generation, previously trading under the name Suntory, always serving a selection of fish almost exclusively Mediterranean. The prices (we spent $140 alone on an alcohol-free lunch, albeit under an unfavorable exchange rate) suggest to us that either embassy expense accounts are still paying the bills or we’ve been shorting the supposed Spanish economic resurgence. If the Madrid’s corporate sector can afford to lunch at Shiratori and still take off the afternoon to nap, sign us up for the Spanish model, whatever that is.
Paseo de La Castellana, 36-38, Madrid.
CALIFORNIA
This is where it all began, and there’s something about the disconnect between the menu’s frenetic catholicism and the drop-ceiling-and-pop-art décor that is the best testament to the irreproducible genius of Nobu-stye cuisine. Pretty much everything available at any other Nobu is on the menu here, but here the sushi bar remains the center of gravity. The best guide to that monstrous list of dishes is the man standing in front of you, who can pull you out of the dazzling global repertoire with a local tip like, say, Santa Barbara shrimp.
129 La Cienega Boulevard, Beverly Hills, Cal. 310.659.9639.
Sushi Gen
The American sushi bar was launched in Little Tokyo in the early 1960s, but the years since haven’t been particularly kind to the neighborhood. Early pioneers Kawafuku and Eigiku are long since gone, Tokyo Kaikan (birthplace of the California roll) drifted between locations as it suffered from high-profile street crime. Urban renewal and suburban flight emptied the old enclave’s street life, but Sushi Gen — its bar staffed by veterans of the Little Tokyo predecessors — is still a clubhouse for the remnants of the old neighborhood’s business gentry, stuck appropriately enough in a strip mall. (Across the street is a smoky yakitori joint à la Japonaise — Tori-gen — that is not to be missed.) As we dined at Sushi-Gen a few years back, Los Angeles was struck a citywide blackout. Mid-lunch, neither diners not chefs were much flustered, and life in Little Tokyo went on.
422 East Second Street, Los Angeles. 213.617.0552.
Sushi Nozawa
It’s been speculated that Studio City has more sushi bars per capita than anywhere else in the country. None of them has received more attention than Sushi Nozawa, whose chef has been celebrated as the “Sushi Nazi” for his authoritarianism, from “Today’s Special: Trust Me” signs to legendary banishments for diners who don’t heed his instructions. Angelenos self-serious about sushi still mob Nozawa’s bar, even if most of the nigiri seems inattentively cut and clumsily molded. Everyone just wants one of the chef’s legendary crab handrolls, which get bestowed upon those who adhere to Nozawa’s rules and don’t challenge his authority. Think of it as the Sushi Cross of the German Eagle.
11288 Ventura Boulevard, Suite C, Studio City. 818.508.7017
We always thought the global-seafood era made the oceanfront crab shack ridiculously vestigial monument to the lure of the sea. Sushi bars in airports seems more our speed, and this one burrowed away in the Santa Monica Airport complex does the trick. Diners get an air-traffic controller’s view of runway activity, even if it’s unlikely that any of our fish ever traveled through SMO. (Note to LAX: once you fix up the Theme Building, there’s no better use for it than a sushi bar.) The Hump is named for World War Two fighter pilot slang for the Himalayas and despite the militaristic name, post-war comity has brought a Hump to downtown Tokyo. There the view celebrates not trans-Pacific commerce, but the architecture of Japanese imperialism: it looks out over the moats and gardens of the emperor’s palace.
3221 Donald Douglas Loop South, 3rd Floor, Santa Monica. 310.313.0977.
MASSACHUSETTS
Oishii Boston
Chinese-Korean chef Ting San has been presiding over a modest 14-seat bar in Chestnut Hill since 1998, but with this concrete temple in the South End takes it all to scale. Ting may be the only person in town who does the necessary volume in high-quality tuna — 400 pounds a week, he estimates — to buy prized local tuna whole during the summer season. But the wonder of Oishii is less about where that bluefin comes from than where it goes: into a namero preparation of scraps tossed with miso, yuzu, wasabi, and the ginger-like myoga, cut into robust dice topped with sudachi in a puddle of yuzu-ade — Ting has more fun with Japanese citrus than most sushi chefs — into a “sandwich” of toro slabs between brown-rice wafers, topped with a filament of gold leaf, a fitting crown for a serving of the trophy local food in the town that gave Boston bluefin its name..
1166 Washington Street, Boston. 617.482.8868.
NEW JERSEY
Sagami
Amazingly, Sagami has been hidden away near the high-speed rail tracks in a corner of suburban South Jersey since 1974, making it an American sushi pioneer (one of the first American bars situated outside a downtown). Husband-wife duo Chigeru and Chizuko Fukuyoshi used to drive up to the Fulton Fish Market several times a week, sleeping in their car so that they would be there when the bazaar opened in the middle of the night. Now the fish comes to them and the sushi hasn’t suffered. But the dark, low-ceilinged rooms and solid treatments of hearty cooked dishes — the kitchen knows its way around a broiler, from the yellowtail collar to the eggplant broiled with a sauce of miso and ground chicken — suggest that the sushi bar upfront is masking a reliable izakaya buried within.
37 West Crescent Boulevard, Collingswood. 856.854.9773.
PENNSYLVANIA
The New York locations (now propagating at a rapid clip) seemed like a busy, loud, amped-up version of the neighborhood sushi bar, but the chain’s 1990s début triggered a near-Talmudic debate over whether a piece of sushi should require one bite or two. There was no room in the discussion for the would-be traditionalist: Haru’s supersized nigiri are at once a salute to American appetites and an inadvertent homage to their original Edo dimensions. The chain is now owned by Benihana — an historical odd turn, since Rocky Aoki’s gamble that the future of Japanese food in the United States would be in ostentatiously cooked meat, not raw seafood, was clearly off. But his vision of the restaurant as stage for spectacle was influential, and the beats pulsing through lounge upstairs at the Philadelphia outpost shows how far Japanese dining has come in the United States since Aoki opened the first Benihana in 1964.
241-243 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. 215.861.8990.
To-Yo
At To-Yo, whose clientele consists largely of the Russians who populate this corner of Northeast Philadelphia, bring-your-own often means bottles of vodka and come-as-you-are invites dramatic displays of fur and jewels. Even though the management isn’t Russian, they seem to know their target audience: the menu challenges the rich, creamy possibilities of sushi. The focus is on the rococo rolls, which are difficult to visualize, and telling one from another based on menu description is a challenge worthy of those who could distinguish Tolstoy’s characters: the “Extra Spicy Tuna Sashimi Roll” is “tuna wrapped extra spicy tuna, all avocado on top, over top is all eel” while the “Russian Dream Roll” is “tuna & salmon with spicy sauce, salmon, tuna & eel on top.” The emphasis on bold flavors culminates in To-Yo’s “special sushi,” which riffs on the Japanese box style but with the rice run through with masago and a heavy dose of sauces alongside. Nothing at To-Yo suffers for subtlety.
13032 Bustleton Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa. 215.698.9928.
NEW YORK
The area between Grand Central and the United Nations has long been home to New York’s most studious Japanese restaurants, and at Yasuda a quiet blond-wood-and-bamboo interior house what may be the closest thing the city has to a classic Edo-mae sushi bar. The $20 lunch special is the best way to try Yasuda: diners are handed a sheet with the day’s available options, the highlights identified in red pen. It is a roster with impressive depth filled with a range of seafood few others seem to be importing from Japan. The prix fixe is good for only five pieces and two rolls — enough on some days to assemble a horizontal tastings of yellowtail, from familiar hamachi to the younger buri and kanpachi — but to round out a filling meal, stop by the rice-ball specialists Oms/b just a couple of blocks away.
204 East 43rd Street, New York. 212.971.1011.
TEXAS
Demographic profiling wouldn’t have much to say for Tyson Cole’s promise as a sushi chef, but this white, thirtysomething military brat raised mostly in northern Florida was clearly born with the requisite obsessiveness for the job. Continental flight 355 is Cole’s connection with the outside world, delivering by air to Hill Country much of the same seafood that rumbles through Midtown Manhattan by truck. At Uchi, that fish finds its way responsibly into all the sushi standards, but the real fun comes when Cole mixes it with local fruits and vegetables from his supermarket adventures, such as a signature dish of raw tuna, watermelon, fish sauce and golden tobiko.
801 South Lamar Boulevard, Austin. 512.916.4808.