It was thrilling news for raw fish and rice fanatics when Sushi Nakazawa expanded in February. Though by most standards it's still a tiny restaurant—a 10-seat counter and a back dining room with 10 tables—on the other side of a gauzy curtain there’s a brand-new lounge where you can walk in without a reservation and pop some nigiri a la carte. This wouldn’t be a big deal at every sushi bar in town, but Nakazawa, which opened in 2013 to instant acclaim, is an infuriatingly difficult reservation to land. It's a bit like when the cast of Hamilton did impromptu outdoor performances for those people who didn't win the day's ticket lottery. A flight of sea urchin at Sushi Nakazawa's new lounge includes pieces from Maine, Santa Barbara, and Hokkaido.The lounge menu is limited to some rolls and a few nigiri flights, but really no one heaves their Ferragamo wallets over to Nakazawa for limitless options. They go for the genius of 38-year-old sushi chef Daisuke Nakazawa, who studied under Jiro Ono in Tokyo for a decade and made an appearance in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. 

Nakazawa builds 21-piece sushi omakases here with joy and precision, using hay smoke, seasonings, and a rainbow of temperatures to overlay all kinds of delicious special effects.The backlit bar at Nakazawa's lounge, a new addition to the sushi bar. And for anyone who’s tried and failed to get a seat for dinner, the lounge can be an introduction to Nakazawa’s style. Though you can’t get the omakase, you can order a few of the delicious three-piece flights a la carte, the very same plates people are eating next door. There’s a trilogy of Atlantic bluefin tuna in which the fishy star grows progressively fattier. Sea urchin glisten in exquisite triplicate, each piece pulled from a different ocean, jiggling gleefully on a mound of rice. The lounge also serves maki in small, neatly rolled bites filled with scallop and yuzu kosho—a casual reconfiguration of Nakazawa’s more glamorous scallop nigiri—or sweet eel, or fatty tuna slapped with chili.  New to the menu: maki made with scallop and yuzu kosho, a reconfiguration of the sushi bar's fantastic scallop nigiri.

When you need to take care of yourself, and spontaneously celebrate something small, the lounge could be a good place to go. Order a glass of Champagne and a plate of wild salmon, and one piece will be especially mellow, gently smoked over hay. You’ll hear the broody strumming of classical guitar on the speakers, and the thwacks of heels on tile as your server appears and vanishes like a cat. All of the servers are in suits, moving quickly and elegantly behind counters and curtains—when you need someone, it can be impossible to get some attention. So after a few bites, feel free to move along to a faster, less expensive dinner somewhere else.The additional new space in the West Village was a destination for leather goods before the restaurant’s owner, Alessandro Borgognone, took it over in January, adding a deep gray marble bar and soft suede banquettes. The room is pretty in a cool, geometric kind of way and you could certainly get comfortable and build out a big dinner by ordering some rolls and one of each of the flights, but you’d be cobbling together a very poor imitation of the omakase, which plays out with so many more carefully ordered moving parts.

Besides, the low lounge tables are a little too small, cramping the style of the food and drinks, and simply not ideal for a two-hour meal.Gently smoked coho salmon at Sushi Nakazawa's new lounge, where you order a few flights of fish a la carte.Borgognone says that he designed the space so that diners at the restaurant could have a comfortable, spendy place to wait for their tables (previously they were asked to wait by the wall, or worse, outside). game magic sushi downloadThe beauty of sushi-making is not a part of the experience here. how much sushi vinegar for 2 cups of riceIn the lounge, there will be no feisty, live shrimp hopping off the cutting board. how to make sushi rice in cooker

And the golden strip of finely structured tamago, the sweet, Japanese-style omelet that Nakazawa mastered in Jiro Dreams of Sushi (in a tearful scene that brought him to Borgognone’s attention) is not available. For a brush with that kind of eggy fame, you'll have to make a reservation after all. The lounge opened to make diners more comfortable while they wait for their table, but it's also a good place to have a whiskey cocktail after dinner, or to sip Champagne with a flight of fish.buy sushi grade fish san franciscoSushi Nakazawa is at 23 Commerce Street (West Village); sushi los angeles kosher+.Rating: Two stars (Very good)how do you get the sushi bar in tiny tower What to Order: There is maki, which is, just as you’d expect, significantly better than the maki you pick up for lunch at Whole Foods. how to make vegetarian sushi youtube

Go with the scallop and yuzu if you’re in the mood for it, but otherwise stick to the more exciting flights that show off Nakazawa’s precision: three pieces of salmon ($22), tuna ($25), sea urchin ($28), or silver fish ($20) nigiri.Who’s Next to You: Thirtysomething couples dressed up for a birthday; a large French-speaking family from SoHo with their weirdly well-behaved small children, waiting for their table; a couple from L.A. in ripped denim and vegan leather, possibly too young for the bottle service they are ordering.Soundtrack: Classical guitar, high heels clicking on tiled floor, and the soft laughter of rich people.Outside Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village. A flight of bluefin tuna from the Atlantic Ocean gets progressively fattier. For a taste of the restaurant's most famous pieces of sushi, you'll have to make a reservation at the sushi bar.This 81 minute documentary about the 85 year old sushi chef Jiro Ono (he was 85 when this movie was made in 2012), better known in Japan as Sukiyabashi Jiro, is not about Jiro dreaming of sushi, but dreaming of a past where women aren’t seen or heard, kitchen apprenticeship is feudal and sushi making is a highly skilled art form and done old style–rice is cooked not in an electric cooker but on the stove and kept warm

in a basket and  katsuo (bonito) is smoked over an open straw fire. And while the film focusses on the tension between Jiro and his first son Yoshikazu’s imminent (for at least 15 years) inheritance of Jiro’s tiny 10 seater sushi bar in Sukiyabashi, Tokyo (graced by U.S. President Barak Obama on his 2014 visit to Japan), the real tension is in the anachronism that is Jiro’s world and the global eating phenomenon that is now “sooshi”-mostly cheap, mayonnaise infested rolls that are made by sushi robots from Moscow to LA to Sydney. Just look at the publicity shot–six men sporting scary eyebrows and starched whites–it’s symbolic of a sushi that is far removed from the sushi go round world of Calfornia and tuna mayo rolls. What is fascinating to see in this film is the dedication to craftsmanship and the aesthetic of sushi. For Jiro’s sushi begins with procuring the freshest fish, requires great skill in cleaning, filleting, preparing the fish (witness the fine skill of the live anago or sea eel being filleted, it’s head skewered to the chopping board Jesus style), the years of discipline and dedication (10 years before you even get to make nigiri) and fine attention to detail.

But what this film lacked is an exploration of the skill and craft and art behind sushi making that is undoubtedly dying, ironically, with the global spread and rising popularity of sushi. Perhaps my disappointment with “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is due to the fact that I had already seen the inspiring 2008 documentary about Jiro on NHK, Japan’s public TV network, which explored in mesmerising detail, Jiro’s obsession with perfection in simplicity. This highly acclaimed “Professional” series airs weekly in Japan and features the work and professionalism of various people who are leaders their respective fields, and Jiro Ono’s documentary aired shortly after his shop received 3 stars in the inaugural and highly controversial Michelin Guide to Tokyo, 2008. In the NHK doco, there is  a telling scene in which Jiro and his employees discuss the curing of saba (mackerel). Saba is a very fatty fish and must be cured in salt for a number of hours, then rinsed clean, then cured in rice vinegar for a number of hours.

But the curing process is part science, part art–there’s no recipe, and it depends on the fattiness of the fish, which you can only guess at. In the NHK doco, the scene is played out in length, and in the end, Jiro decides the curing is not sufficient, and that day’s saba (about 4-5 fish) are thrown out. In “Dreams”, this scene is a mere montage and the saba curing drama is merely alluded to. Also included in the NHK doco is the result of a rice grain counting research–in which the number of rice grains in Jiro’s nigiri is counted. I forget the number of nigiri actually counted, but between them, there was a difference of only about 1-2 rice grains per each nigiri…meaning almost every nigiri Jiro makes is the same. The rice grains were facing mostly in the same direction too, which I’d always thought was an urban sushi myth, but not according to the NHK doco on Jiro…. Being 85, Jiro is a legend in his own lifetime. And “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is really worth seeing if you want a glimpse into a world which will be no longer.