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

"I found the brand-new, chicly appointed hand-roll bar to be worth a certain amount of inconvenience: it isn’t cheap, but it offers a much more accessible avenue to seafood of the highest quality because the chefs worked at Masa. You can try to avoid waits by arriving at 5:30 when it opens or just before 11 when it closes, or grab one of the limited nightly reservations; service is exceptionally efficient (orders go to the kitchen via tablets and expediters direct dishes like air-traffic controllers). A useful rule of thumb here is that the less exciting a dish sounds the more delicious it’s likely to be: “Calamari, yuzu soy” was one of the best things I’ve eaten in months—pearly, sushi-grade squid in an ethereally puffy, chewy rice-and-tapioca batter. Nori chips were almost like savory toffee, the hard crunch melting into salty stickiness, and the yogurt-chive dip that came with them rivaled the finest ranch. Some items disappointed—the plum sesame salt on the edamame was undermined by overcooked pods, and the furikake fries were surprisingly limp (though I liked the ketchup doctored with tonkatsu sauce and Tabasco). The temaki (hand rolls) are delicate U-shaped nori cups of rice and fish: the best-seller, “spicy crab dynamite,” is a crunchy temaki (nori encrusted with crispy rice) and a fan favorite, while the California temaki showcases a cool clump of sweet crab meat on creamy avocado. I preferred the mellow simplicity of fatty toro with fresh scallion to the frillier sea bass with daikon, perilla, and chojang or to the lobster-tempura with yuzu aioli and frisée—though one woman at the bar declared the lobster-tempura temaki “the best bite I’ve ever had in my life.” (Temaki $5–$10.)" - Hannah Goldfield