Sushi Azabu

Continuing on my Michelin tour around New York, I met up with two more blog readers to have a nice dinner at Sushi Azabu. Jeanine and David happen to also be my neighbors; Jeanette saw my brother, David, on the elevator and recognized him from a my cupcake posts! I also had pictures of my apartment in the posts and Jeanine and David live on the other side of the elevator bank with the same exact layout, so that’s how she pieced it together. What a small world!

We met up for dinner on a Friday night after work and we were very excited to have dinner at Sushi Azabu. David, Laura, and I have tried to eat at the restaurant in the past but it seems to always be booked (there are only a handful of seats at the sushi bar and then three tables in the restaurant, so reservations do get filled quickly). We decided to try the azabu course, which included a starter, Sashimi (2 kinds), Yaki-mono, Suno-mono 7 Pieces of Nigiri, Maki-mono and Miso Soup.

We sat in the corner at the sushi bar so we could watch the chefs and chat:

We started with a lotus root starter:

I’m a big fan of lotus root because it’s crunchy and adapts well with other flavors (this lotus root was infused with soy sauce and a little sweet as well).

Our sashimi included three pieces of tuna and two pieces of snapper:

The fish is flown in from Japan every day and is very fresh; the tuna was very fresh but the snapper was a little too chewy.

Our next course was tilefish with a pickled yamamomo berry:

The tilefish was really flavorful, tender, and meaty. The skin was also slightly crispy and lightly fried, which was very delicious.

Next, we had clams with pickled cucumbers:

I wasn’t a fan of the clams and also thought the pickled cucumbers were too sweet.

After our yaki-mono and suno-mono, a server presented a charcoal colored serving plate in front of the three of us so we could get started with our seven pieces of nigiri. We all started with tuna:

The sushi chef prepared all of the pieces with soy sauce and wasabi and instructed us to just eat it (it’s also very disrespectful if you dip the fish in soy sauce after the chef has explicitly told you he’s already done it). The tuna was much more delicate than the sashimi we ate when we first arrived and I liked this tuna much more (although both were very good).

I don’t remember the types of all of the fish we ate, but everything was very good:

King salmon:

The chef noticed that Jeanine was eating each piece of nigiri in two bites so he started cutting up the nigiri into two bites:

My favorite piece of nigiri from the evening was definitely the scallops sprinkled with sea salt:

For the salmon roe, the chef also split mine into two pieces because otherwise he didn’t think I would’ve been able to fit it into my mouth in one bite:

The salmon roe was much more delicate than what I’ve had in other restaurants – it really was very delicious. During our meal, we were saying how it’s so difficult to eat cheap sushi after you’ve eaten good sushi because there really is a huge difference in quality.

My least favorite piece from the night was the tamago:

I thought it wasn’t sweet enough (or flavorful enough in general), although it looked very cool because it looked like a 100 layer cake (extremely thin layers of egg that stacked up into the dish).

I wasn’t a huge fan of the maki-mono, pickled radishes:

The chef gave us one more piece of nigiri before we moved onto our miso soup:

It wasn’t a lot of food for the evening, but we finished with bowls of miso soup with mushrooms:

Jeanine also ordered dessert:

The meal was very enjoyable but a little on the pricey side. I really appreciated the chef’s attention to detail (especially when he started cutting up each piece of fish into two pieces for Jeanine) and it was really nice of him to give us one more piece of fish after he served us our seven pieces of nigiri. I’d definitely return to the restaurant, although next time, I think I might eat a little before hand because I was still pretty hungry when I left the restaurant.