Sous-chef Hiroto Ochiai gamely runs the small kitchen where the cooked dishes are created, but from start to finish, behind the counter is the Shion Uino show.
Shion at 69 Leonard is 18 courses, but it’s the first 6 – the Otsumami – that take the bulk of the time. Palate cleanser Let’s talk about the meal But I was absolutely not prepared to hear “imagine if Chipotle had this rice”. The other 7 were made up of two tourists, 3 finance dudes and a well-known NYC food writer, her partner and their 34 foot camera (approximate).Įveryone was very respectful. There are a lot of ways to describe who you’ll be eating with at the 9 seat counter if you go, but here’s the easiest: If Koppelman was re-shooting the Wags scene from Billions in 2021, Shion at 69 Leonard – not Nakazawa – would be the setting. Have you seen the sushi scene in Billions? Duh, of course you have, especially if you’ve seen my 1,000 references to it on Instagram or the blog. Credit my ADD I guess.īe prepared for a certain type of clientele But the child in me is always fascinated by expediency. As Kikuo Shimizu put in his seminal ‘ Edomae Sushi’ book, “there’s no one royal road” to making nigiri. And like Saito-san, you’ll notice right away that he spends very little time forming his nigiri. Like other itamae – including Takashi Saito himself – he spends time aging his fish. Eating them all is like playing Edomae bingo. The phrase Tenka No Sandai Chinmi Is sometimes tossed around – it refers to the three great chinmi of the Edo period (17th-19th centuries): Uni (Sea Urchin), Konowata (Sea Cucumber intestines) and Karasumi (salted mullet roe). If you’re unfamilar, Chinmi are loosely defined rare and unusual delicacies. There are even discussions of opening a down-market bar in the basement space serving small bites and “Chinmi”. I can see a world in which the restaurant undergoes a semi-regular Itamae and name rotation, but Elkon sees this relationship as permanent and has no plans to change things up moving forward.
With Shion’s move in May 2021, the restaurant renamed again to Shion at 69 Leonard St. Experienced diners will know Uino-San from Sushi Amane, the midtown-east sushiya that earned the whispers I mentioned up front, as well as many years at revered Tokyo sushi-ya Sushi Saito. He left earlier this year to move to Los Angeles in what owner Idan Elkon tells me was just a natural endpoint given the pandemic. Ichimura had left his closed eponymous sushiya at Brushstroke, which I reviewed in 2012 and credit for starting the sushi revolution in NYC (alongside the popularity of Jiro Dreams of Sushi and the rise of Instagram, of course).īy June 2017 however, Ichimura had moved on, replaced by Derek Wilcox, an NYC native with plenty of experience at acclaimed restaurants in Japan.Īt the renamed Shoji at 69 Leonard St., Wilcox spent much of his 3+ year tenure slinging a hybrid of kyo-kaiseki and edomae-style nigiri at the Omakase counter, all to great acclaim. It actually opened in Janaury 2017 as Ichimura under the direction of veritable legend Eiji Ichimura.
0 kommentar(er)
