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Tokyo: Sushi Bar Yasuda (Sep. 2013)
Author: Victor
Chef: Naomichi Yasuda
Website: http://www.sushibaryasuda.com/index_e.html
Date: September 17, 2013
After Shimada, I started to crave some sushi. I was going to get some really good sushi for dinner on the 18th and 19th, so it was probably silly of me to get sushi on the 17th haha. (Oh well, I’m pretty impatient.) I wanted sushi right that day, so I called Yasuda that day and made same-day reservations.
Sushi Yasuda has a reputation of being the best sushi restaurant in NYC (outside of Masa), and the sushi has generally been pretty great the few times I’ve been there. The environment there always feels rushed, though, as sometimes they will limit your dinner to maybe an hour or an hour and a half. The chefs in that restaurant also feel less friendly compared to some of my favorite sushi-ya in NYC (such as 15 East).
Sushi Bar Yasuda, his new restaurant in Tokyo, has a very different environment from the NYC restaurant. It’s a lot more intimate, as it’s a sushi bar with only eight seats. In contrast to the NYC restaurant, where several sushi chefs make the food for the sushi bar and several tables, Chef Yasuda is the only one preparing the food here, and his wife handles the drinks and bills. There’s also no rush at all in this restaurant. Yasuda would mention several times that the NYC restaurant would often give customers a time limit for their meal and that there would be no such restriction here—we were free to take as long as we wanted.
It’s a really small operation, and it feels like he’s just running a restaurant as a hobby instead of to make money. His NYC restaurant was wildly successful (and continues to be), so he can afford to do this as a “retirement” gig haha. He seems to largely cater to foreigners now, as he mentioned that the majority of his customers are foreigners who have heard of him.
(If you’re curious about why Chef Yasuda left for Japan, the blog “Do You Even Eat” does a pretty good job of giving an explanation in this post.)
Anyway, let’s discuss the sushi! The sushi here is considered to be mid-level in terms of prices. 12 pieces of sushi cost 3,800 JPY (about $39 USD), and the price is adjusted if you ask for more pieces (most people tend to do that). That price ratio is NOT expensive at all by Japanese standards, and the result is that the quality of the fish simply won’t be as good as some of the top sushi-ya in Tokyo.
He still goes to Tsukiji Market every day to select his fish (though not at auction hours), and I think he feels some pride in the fact that he handles all the food himself. (He chooses the fish, cooks his rice, and prepares the sushi for you. He’s able to exercise more culinary freedom now in ways that he couldn’t back in NYC.)
Tokyo: Shimada (Sep. 2013)
Author: Victor
Chef: Hirochi Shimada
September 17, 2013
I read about this restaurant while browsing around on Eater, and it became a must-try restaurant for me. The chef, Hirochi Shimada, used to be at Azabu Yukimura, a 3-star. He wanted to have his own restaurant and cook high-quality food for much more affordable prices, however. His solution to that was to open up a standing-only restaurant! There’s one main standing bar and a table that seats four.
The restaurant handles up to 14 at a time, and there’s one main standing counter and a table that seats four. There’s only a relatively small sign outside that says Shimada, and it’s a pretty hard-to-find restaurant. I can’t read any Japanese, so I kind of just walked around and opened the door, hoping that it would be the place hahaha. I got lucky, though, and found it on my first try (so maybe it’s not THAT hard to find)!
When I entered the restaurant, I realized that everyone spoke Japanese. They all kind of stared at me when I asked if there were any openings available. I got lucky in that someone there actually spoke English, though! He said that there was room, and I went to go stand next to him. His name was Jun, and he ended up helping me order for my entire meal. We ended up talking a lot during the meal, and we even shared a bunch of dishes. He even bought me dinner at the end (saying that it’s Japanese custom for the host to pay), and I have definitely got to buy him dinner next time!
HK: Sushi Kuu (Aug. 2013)
Author: Victor
Exec Chef: Satoru Mukogawa
My Sushi Chef: Ivan Ko
August 28, 2013
I arrived in Hong Kong after a few fun nights in Chengdu, China. I was going to be in HK for only a few days, so I wanted to make sure I got the chance to eat something really delicious while I was there. I was craving good sushi, and I had heard about Sushi Kuu before, but I didn’t exactly go ahead and make the reservation. I was being lazy…
What did happen, though, was that I got dinner in Central with a couple of friends from New York (some now live in HK). After dinner, I was still hungry, so I walked by Kuu and checked it out to see if there was space at the sushi bar. There was! My sushi chef was named Ivan, and I quickly went with the Chef’s Omakase. I didn’t exactly have the calories to spare, but I totally ignored that. A new high-end sushi restaurant to try! I can’t let simple calories hold me back!
Ivan was pretty quiet for the first few courses, but after we got to the sushi part of the meal he opened up more. I feel like people in HK don’t really interact with sushi chefs nearly as much as they do in, for instance NYC. (Then again, there was a party of two nearby having a LOT of fun and drinking a massive amount of alcohol. They were pretty much sharing shots with other chefs/management and so on. That was pretty entertaining hahaha.)
Monte
Victor
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