Sushi Noz

The larger of the two rooms seats eight at a counter cut from 200-year-old hinoki, a dozen kinds of cedar around it and a wooden ice chest behind, cooled by blocks of ice rather than electricity in the way sushi counters worked before refrigeration reached them. Six more sit in the ash room, at an L-shaped counter of tamo, an ash once reserved for Japanese royalty. Nozomu Abe takes the hinoki counter Monday to Friday.

He grew up in Hokkaido around a seafood company his grandfather ran, apprenticed in Sapporo, then spent years in Tokyo on Edomae technique before moving to New York in 2007 and running Sushiden for three. He opened here in 2018 with the brothers David and Joshua Foulquier, and the aging and curing that Edomae was built on still carry the cooking. Most pieces reach the counter under wasabi and a stroke of soy, nothing else.

Dinner is $550 and lasts about two and a half hours, in a fixed shape: five or six otsumami, then twelve to fourteen nigiri, miso soup, tamago and dessert. Eel is smoked over bamboo leaves, the jaw of a bluefin takes its char from red-hot binchotan rather than a blowtorch, and the rice, seasoned with kombu, comes hotter than most counters send it out. Much of the tableware is antique, some of it from Abe's family and some carried back from his trips to Japan. The house asks that perfume be kept light.