There was no putting it off any longer - it was time for Sugiyama. Some argue it’s the best Japanese meal (re: meal, not sushi) in NYC. Nao Sugiyama worked as the omakase chef for Matsuhisa (LA, the original Nobu) back when that meant something. It’s also rumored he also created the infamous, and ubiquituous, miso black cod dish that every “asian fusion” restaurant in this country serves.
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Restaurants can be good or they can be grand, and the difference can be summed up in a single word: attention. Recently some friends and I ate at Sugiyama, a restaurant that is, by all accounts, one of the prime kaiseki restaurants in New York, that Japanese cuisine that channels seasonal cuisine, tied closely to market availability. Having just returned from a pair of astonishing kaiseki meals in Kyoto (at Kinmata and at Yutaka), I can report my meal that Sugiyama was quite as rapturous. In both of those wonderful Japanese meals I had the full attention of the chef. For the first I ate in my room at the lovely Kinmata ryokan (an elegant and historic Japanese inn), served by the chef; at the second a colleague and I were the only diners at a superior establishment where my companion had a connection with the proprietor.
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I’ve been spending a good deal of time in Japanese restaurants over the past few years. Call it in search of the best kaiseki. The opening of Masa in the Time Warner building was what really kicked it off. Masa, with a price point of $350, raised the question of whether dinner at a Japanese restaurant in the U.S. could be worth that amount of money. It also posed the more interesting question (at least to me) which is, does Japanese cuisine rise to the same level as western haute cuisine? Without digressing into the substance of that topic – after all this thread is a restaurant review and not an comparative analysis of cuisines, it does serve as helpful background information for readers when they wonder how I reached my conclusion that Sugiyama is the best overall Japanese dining experience I’ve found in the U.S.
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LINK: http://www.blogsoop.com/nyc_rid_4874.html
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