jiro dreams of sushi greenwich
Chef Daisuke Nakazawa's new restaurant will not serve sushi. WEST VILLAGE — A chef featured in the movie "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" is opening a new Japanese restaurant on Grove Street — but it won't serve any sushi.A proposed menu crafted by chef Daisuke Nakazawa — who helms the kitchen at the acclaimed Sushi Nakazawa on Commerce Street and was featured in the "Jiro" sushi documentary — will branch out from Nakazawa's sushi specialties to feature an array of fresh seafood dishes.The menu at the as-yet-unnamed spot at 55 Grove St. combines Japanese and American ingredients and preparations.Prospective dishes for the $125-per-person tasting menu include: fluke carpaccio with white sturgeon caviar, Meyer lemon, seaweed and a Japanese mustard called karashi; a type of Japanese bluefish called Akamutsu with Bordeaux spinach and poached citrus jam; and sea urchin on a "nest" of spaghettini and arugula. Other seafood dishes of the proposed menu include Dungeness crab with roasted pistachio, broccoli and and a citrus-seasoned soy sauce called ponzu;
live Maine scallop with creamed butter and blackened chives; and baby octopus with fingerling potatoes, citrus and soured cherry.Nakazawa will also try his hand at non-seafood items, such as an okra and honeycrisp apple salad; duck liver with strawberry and honey; dry aged beef toast with wasabi, Himalayan rock salt and blackened leeks; and butternut squash ravioli with candied walnuts and Meyer lemon.Alex Borgognone, the restaurateur behind Sushi Nakazawa as well as the new spot, said one of his motivations in opening the new location is to accept walk-ins, in contrast to Sushi Nakazawa's strict reservation-only policy."We wanted to do something a little different, something where people can actually walk in without a reservation," Borgognone told members of Community Board 2's liquor license committee, requesting their support for his application to the State Liquor Authority. "It’s a little bit more of a casual setting, but once again at a high level."The new restaurant will also take reservations, but it will set aside a few tables to accommodate walk-ins.
People waiting to be seated will be sent to a bar in the lower level of the restaurant, which can seat up to eight people and will offer the full menu for patrons who decide to stay and eat there.Borgognone said that while the price point of the new restaurant will be "similar to Nakazawa," he's hoping to make his Grove Street venture family-friendly. He is taking over the whole building at 55 Grove St., though the top two floors will be set aside for office space, with the restaurant on the ground floor and the bar below.Borgognone said nothing will change at Sushi Nakazawa's original 23 Commerce St. location, where diners are offered a 20-course "omakase" — a Japanese term for a chef's choice tasting menu. The menu there changes daily based on the catch fishermen deliver to the restaurant, but has frequently featured such delicacies as a live Florida Tiger shrimp killed directly in front of the guest; eel from salty sea waters off the Japanese island of Kyushu; "torched" Geoducks (a breed of giant clam from Washington State);
Most of us had reserved a month before. Now we found ourselves sitting in the small, bright, glossy, black-and-white front room of the restaurant, which opened in August in the West Village.
sushi san francisco ryokoIt looked about as Japanese as Peter Luger. Servers in black suits were offering hot towels, water and drinks, and more water, and then small talk, until it became clear that they were stalling. Were they going to let us eat?Finally, Daisuke Nakazawa walked in the front door. “I’m sorry,” the chef said cheerfully as he slid behind the counter and prepared for work. He had just come back from Pier 76, he said. The police had towed his car.Then he picked up a palmful of rice and began to serve one of the four most enjoyable and eye-opening sushi meals I have ever eaten. I had the other three at Sushi Nakazawa over the next few weeks.The moment-to-moment joys of eating one mouthful of sushi after another can merge into a blur of fish bliss.
But almost everything Mr. Nakazawa cups in his hands and places in front of you is an event on its own. A piece of his sushi grabs control of your senses, and when it’s gone, you wish you could have it again. These little events carve themselves into your memory. So does the meal, 21 pieces or so over about two hours. I remember precisely the dull luster of Mr. Nakazawa’s mackerel and the way its initial firmness gave way to a minor-key note of pickled fish and a major-key richness that kept building the longer I chewed. I can feel the warmth of just-poached blue shrimp from the South Pacific islands of New Caledonia, which had a flavor that was deep, clean and delicate at the same time. I can tell you about the burning-leaf smell of skipjack smoked over smoldering hay until it becomes a softer, aquatic version of aged Italian speck. We don’t normally think of one sushi piece as wildly different from the next, apart from the inherent qualities of the main ingredient. But one of the points made by the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” was that a driven, obsessed chef will treat each sea creature as a unique challenge.
He’ll ask, how can I make the best piece of horse mackerel anyone has ever tasted? When Jiro Ono dreamed of sushi, what he saw were new dishes waiting to be invented.In the movie, Mr. Nakazawa was the young apprentice who cried when Mr. Ono conceded that he had finally made an acceptable egg custard. With his shaved scalp, bowed head, downturned eyes and meek acceptance of Mr. Ono’s criticisms, he gave the impression of a novice Zen monk who was accustomed to abuse in the name of enlightenment. (He also gave you the idea that Jiro could be kind of a pill.) Mr. Nakazawa must have learned something, because his fish often tastes as if it has been coaxed along until it’s as delicious as it’s ever going to get. Each slice has a slightly different temperature, affecting flavor and texture, whether it spreads on your tongue or stays firm and chewy. All good sushi chefs do this, but Mr. Nakazawa seems to be able to hit any point on the thermometer with an assassin’s aim, locating a temperature for yellowtail belly that makes its buttery richness into a time-release pleasure bomb.
He gets other effects by skipping the standard wasabi smear. He dabs Japanese mustard under medium-fatty tuna and the hay-smoked skipjack, bringing out its bloody-lip tang. Yuzukosho, a paste of bright yuzu peel and burning chiles, bites playfully into the cool sweetness of a sea scallop lopped from its shell just a minute before it’s served, its edges still fluttering. That scallop dish is distinctively his, and once you’ve had it you’d know it anywhere.Not everything I ate was in that category, and not everything is the best in town. The eel and octopus at 15 East are still undefeated, and possibly the rice, too, although Mr. Nakazawa’s has a wonderfully rich, rounded flavor. The $450 menu at Masa may glide to a higher pitch of pleasure, but the most striking dishes arrive before the sushi starts. No restaurant in town does as much with sushi, and sushi alone, as Nakazawa.Behind the counter of Sushi Nakazawa, the chef is nothing like the movie’s humble stepchild. He laughs, he jokes, he handles live animals.
One evening he held out a tray of sea urchins, their spikes groping the air, and asked each of us to choose one. The tiger shrimp he set down on white plates another night had more energy. With a flick of its tail one jumped up in front of a woman at the counter’s end. She jumped even higher. Another customer, more game, picked up the shrimp just above its wriggling legs, pointed toward his mouth in pantomime (Mr. Nakazawa is learning English), and asked the chef, “What is the best way?” The best way is to wait until Mr. Nakazawa yanks off its head, strips its shell and drapes the raw shrimp over a cushion of rice. Everything is gently pressed over rice, in the two-century-old Edo style of sushi that Mr. Nakazawa respects and refines. Sashimi is not served, and there are no hot dishes from the kitchen.Sushi Nakazawa operates more like a tasting-menu restaurant than most Japanese sushi places. Mr. Nakazawa does not take requests until the very end, when he offers to sell you a second taste of anything.
He does work around dietary restrictions, though. (He also notices who’s left-handed, and sets their sushi down with the ends pointing at 8 o’clock and 2 o’clock so it’s easier to pick up with the fingers.)There are three seatings a night at the counter. Reservations there can be made only for parties of two, which is needlessly unaccommodating; sushi counter dining is one of Japan’s great gifts to solo diners, and I can’t imagine Sushi Nakazawa would have trouble filling the slots. Reservations for the 25 seats in the back are more flexible, with staggered times and a discounted price, $120 instead of $150 at the counter. You can’t see the show from the cheap seats, and the room, while perfectly comfortable, will not be appearing in any interior-design magazines. But the sushi is rushed to the tables while the rice is still warm, which is crucial, and the dining room is the place to sit if you want to have a conversation without interruptions from jumping shrimp.Interruptions from Rick Zouad, the sommelier, are welcome, though.
I am skeptical of pairings with tasting menus, but Mr. Zouad’s choices flattered each style of sake, and the price, $40 for six or seven glasses, is almost a gift. There are some very tempting half-bottles of Champagne from Chartogne-Taillet and other small producers or, for $12, about 15 percent of the price of the Champagnes, a 17-ounce Japanese lager brewed by Echigo from sushi rice that hits the reset button as effectively as pickled ginger. Sushi Nakazawa is owned by Alessandro Borgognone, whose other restaurant is Patricia’s, his family’s place in the Bronx. At home one night, Mr. Borgognone watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and announced that he was going to bring one of the chefs to New York. His wife, reasonably, said no, you’re not. Luckily, he ignored her, and eventually found Mr. Nakazawa working in Seattle for another former apprentice of Mr. Ono’s. The trip from the Bronx to the West Village is probably easier to make than the trip from “spaghetti Frank Sinatra” to raw triggerfish under a squiggle of its own liver.