Oku

"On East 12th Street just below Union Square, there’s a big, unmarked black door with a bouquet of dried flowers instead of a sign. Open the door and get past the velvet curtain, and you’ll find a narrow room filled with a rectangular sushi bar where 20 people sit ready to spend many hundreds of dollars watching one of the best restaurant games in the city. Everywhere you look, there’s action. One chef is slicing immaculate pieces of trout and snapper and orata, another’s searing tuna with smoking coals, another is scraping meat off fish skeletons, and all of them are making constant calls to ensure that every person around that bar is happy. This is Shuko, the Japanese restaurant where dinner at the sushi bar is like sitting courtside. Courtside seats are a sign that you’ve made it. You get to watch every play up-close, feel like the V.I.P. that you are, and also see Turtle from Entourage, while pretending you don’t care that you see Turtle from Entourage. But you don’t need $10,000 worth of Knicks tickets to get that experience. You just need to go to Shuko. Let us be clear. Shuko is expensive. Not ten grand expensive, but the omakase starts at $270 per person. Once you factor in everything else, this is at least a $350 meal. But if you’re looking to have an incredible special occasion meal, and are able to pay for it, you should book a few seats here. Most people here are celebrating something—birthdays, anniversaries, or Tuesdays. The courtside restaurant life is a party. A party where you have your own personal sushi chef, where your sake or cocktail glass is never empty, and where the music, never too loud, moves from Lauryn Hill to Wu Tang Clan to A Tribe Called Quest to Biggie. We’re not sure a piece of toro will ever taste as good as it did here, while listening to "Juicy." But nothing—not the chefs, the soundtrack, or the couple next to you trying to decide whether they should let their travel agent choose their vacation chateau—can distract you from the reason you’re here: the sushi. The omakase starts with three small prepared dishes, and then moves on to 18 of some the best bites of fish we’ve eaten. There’s stuff like kanpachi, snapper, ocean trout, and uni—standards, only in the sense that you’ve maybe seen them before. That ocean trout is topped with a sliver jalapeño, and the uni from Santa Barbara will wipe away every other piece of uni from your memory. There are also signature Shuko pieces, like the suji, a piece of grilled tuna topped with bird’s eye chili and scallion, wrapped in crisp seaweed—as well as seasonal specials, like fried cod sperm topped with shaved truffle. You’re going to want seconds and thirds of both. After the omakase, ice cream will arrive. You’ll eat it in a few bites, but you won’t be ready to leave. Maybe you don’t want your birthday to be over, maybe you need a few more minutes to process what’s happened to you over the past two hours, or maybe you still haven’t figured out whether that really is Turtle over on the other side of the bar. All of these are reasons to order one last thing from the limited supplement menu. This is your final reward for the life choices that have brought you to Shuko—a restaurant that will never disappoint. Unlike the Knicks. Food Rundown Omakase This is the reason you come to Shuko. It’s 18 pieces of some of the best fish you’ll ever eat—like toro, striped amberjack, Santa Barbara uni, scallop, bluefin tuna, orata, fluke, glass shrimp, and two kinds of snapper, among many others. Also typically included are Shuko signatures like the suji, a one-bite handroll of grilled tuna and bird’s eye chili." - Katherine Lewin