Nami Nori’s Hand Rolls Are Worth the Wait | The New Yorker

"On the one hand, the West Village is the kind of neighborhood where, on a Wednesday night at six-thirty, you might be quoted a ninety-minute wait for a seat at a brand-new chicly appointed hand-roll bar called Nami Nori. It's a restaurant that's worth a certain amount of inconvenience. The chefs worked at Masa, the incredibly expensive sushi restaurant in the Time Warner Center. Nami Nori isn't cheap, but it's a much more accessible avenue to seafood of the highest quality. Once you're seated, the experience becomes exceptionally efficient. Servers send orders to the kitchen via tablets, which means that plates might start arriving before you've even finished perusing the menu. Expediters communicate like air-traffic controllers, directing items to particular seats: 'Sea bass one, spicy tuna three.' A good general rule here is that the less exciting a dish sounds the more delicious it's likely to be, and vice versa. 'Calamari, yuzu soy' turned out to be one of the best things I've eaten in months: pearly slices of sushi-grade squid battered in an ethereally puffy, chewy mixture of rice and tapioca flour. Nori chips were almost like savory toffee, hard crunch melting into salty stickiness, and the yogurt-chive dip that came with them rivalled the finest ranch. The hand rolls, or temaki, consist of taut yet delicate sheets of nori cupped around rice and fish like the letter 'U.' Fans of hot mayonnaise might enjoy the 'spicy crab dynamite' temaki, which I was told is the best-seller and which is one of two rolls listed as 'crunchy,' meaning it's wrapped in nori that's encrusted with little barnacles of crispy rice. (The other is called 'avocado ‘toast.’' ) Fans of crab might be happier with the California temaki, which features a cool clump of sweet meat atop creamy avocado. I preferred the mellow simplicity of fatty toro and fresh scallion to the frillier combination of sea bass, daikon, perilla (Korean mint), and chojang (Korean hot sauce), and to lobster tempura garnished with yuzu aioli and frisée." - Hannah Goldfield