The $450 Omakase Is Only the Start of the Bill
Keiji Nakazawa's Midtown counter is the best sushi in New York and one of the hardest tables in the country. Here's what the base price hides.
A slab of pickled mackerel arrives at the hinoki counter, cured in the Edomae tradition Keiji Nakazawa has spent forty years refining. The next twenty-eight courses will move at a pace that some diners find breathless and others find purposeful. Both readings are correct. What is not up for debate is that this is the best sushi in New York.
Nakazawa opened the original Sushi Sho in Yotsuya in 1989 after training at twenty different restaurants across Japan starting at age fifteen. He runs a Honolulu outpost. The Midtown location opened in 2024, took two Michelin stars that year, and picked up a third in 2025. The New York Times placed it at number eight in its 2025 Top 100. The scoreboard is real, and the room lives up to it.
Editorial Deep
The omakase runs roughly twenty-nine courses for $450, built around Nakazawa's Edomae fermentation and preservation program. Rare cuts appear that most New York sushiya do not have the sourcing or the technique to serve. The fish is the point, but the koji, the cures, the ages are the education. This is the sushi meal you fly for.
The counter is hinoki, half-hexagonal, flanked by towering carved-wood ice boxes that anchor the room the way a great bar back anchors a great bar. Eight to ten seats. No photography inside, which is enforced and which changes the energy of the room in the correct direction — people are looking at the fish and at Nakazawa, not at their phones.
Service is calibrated to the counter — knowledgeable, precise, occasionally quick. The most consistent complaint is pacing: dishes arrive faster than some diners want, and at the base price without add-ons the meal can feel truncated. The Okonomi list solves this.
Is the spend earned? For what Nakazawa is doing — Edomae fermentation at a level that has almost no peer in North America, sourcing and technique that read like a Tokyo counter transplanted whole — yes, if you order it correctly. The base-only diner who leaves hungry has a legitimate grievance. The diner who came for the Okonomi and ordered accordingly did not overpay.
If money were no object, three or four times a year — the fermentation program rotates enough that repeat visits reveal work you didn't see the first time. In reality, this is a once-a-year table, and it takes the annual slot ahead of the other candidates in the city.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The omakase plus 6-10 Okonomi add-ons
“The best sushi in New York, and the base price is a decoy.”
Go, and budget for the complete meal with Okonomi add-ons rather than the $450 the menu advertises; the base menu alone is the one way to leave Sushi Sho disappointed.
The Verdict
