Tanoshi Sushi Sake Bar never meant to take reservations. When the cramped, Japanese restaurant, which has only twelve backless stools and no liquor license, opened last year on York Avenue and 73rd Street, owner King Ang put out a sign-up list each afternoon at 2.
Soon a crowd started gathering, lured by a 12-piece omakase with offerings such as the “Triple X” — a decadent bite featuring sea urchin, roe and a raw quail yolk — at the relatively reasonable price tag of only $65 per person. By this past summer, the situation was out of control.
“People would arrive at 10 a.m. and soon there were 40 or 50 people waiting outside the door,’’ sighs Ang. Persistent diners began hiring TaskRabbits to wait in line and plead with restaurant staff. “Women would start crying and say their bosses would fire them if they didn’t get reservations,’’ he recalls.
After years of bacon, burgers and bone marrow hogging the culinary spotlight, diners are hungry for raw fish. The hardest reservation to score is a seat at one of the buzzy new sushi bars springing up around town.
“We have lived through fat on fat, but sushi has cleaner and brighter flavors, [and] you don’t have to unbuckle your belt five times at the end of a meal,’’ says Bon Appétit restaurant editor Andrew Knowlton. For a while, “French was considered the best food, then Spanish took the torch, now it’s Japanese.’’
Pricey omakase — where diners leave it to the chef to select their fish — has become the meal of the moment.
“Omakase is blowing up right now,’’ says Kate Krader, restaurant editor at Food and Wine. “There is nothing that conveys an elite experience like being personally handed a piece of food by a chef.’’
That’s especially true when the chef sliding the sushi across the bar is a disciple of a revered Tokyo master.
Daisuke Nakazawa, a disciple of Jiro Ono of “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” fame, opened his own place in the West Village in September. Its $150 omakase offering quickly became one of the hottest tickets in town.
Nakazawa is more playful than his master — he’s been known to place a squirming live shrimp on a diner’s plate before poaching it to turn it into a succulent bite — but his sushi is no less serious. He has, however, made adjustments for his Big Apple clientele.
“The audience here is different,” he says. “In Tokyo we would never serve salmon, and here I add more local coastal fish.’’
Another new spot both bowing to tradition and bending the rules is New York Sushi Ko, an 11-seat omakase spot on the Lower East Side that opened in July.
The man behind the sushi bar is chef John Daley, a towering tattooed guy of Irish descent who chats up customers as he uses a blow torch to melt tuna lardon over a heap of toro.
“It brings out the depth and complexity [of the fish],” he explains.
Sushi chefs say that Big Apple palates have moved well beyond the California rolls of yore.
“It used to be all about tuna, yellowtail and rolls filled with lots of ingredients,” says Tadashi Ono, chef at Maison O, a playful new Japanese spot on Kenmare Street. “Now in New York, people are actually enjoying the texture and taste of different fish. The level here is almost like Tokyo.”
And it’s not only new places feeling the surge in sushi’s popularity.
Masato Shimizu, master at beloved raw fish temple 15 East, helped train Daley and now he is feeling the new wave. He says sushi has a rush of recent converts.
“We have always had a very regular clientele, I know the faces at the bar, but suddenly we have all these newcomers,’’ he says.
Megu, a sprawling Japanese restaurant with locations in Tribeca and Midtown, had to bring over three new sushi chefs from Japan this fall to accommodate all the reservations, and they are far from alone.
“The requests for high-end sushi chefs in New York has surged,’’ says Steven Kamali, founder of The Chef Agency, a recruitment firm. “We have twice as many as we did at this time last year.’’
But, Knowlton warns, the trend has a finite lifespan. “There are fewer fish in the ocean and more people are eating them,” he says. “It’s not going to be around forever, so enjoy it while you can.’’