![]() ![]() I don’t want to give away too much, but dinner might begin with a soft lotus root dumpling with springy tofu skin. What lets Noz 17 stand out is how aggressively the ordering of courses veers from New York sushi script. Then again, Manhattan doesn’t lack excellent and expensive sushi spots - venues where dinner for two can cost as much as a good sofa. The Foulquier Brothers Josh and David, along with Nozomu Abe, have yet another excellent omakase spot on their hands. “The most I’ve ever spent on a meal.” The price, $400 with service, is technically on the lower end of the high-end sushi spectrum in New York, which is a fun thing to tell the person paying for you. There is no music, only the sounds of knives slicing through bonito, a dude talking about crypto in hushed tones, and a patron gasping about the cost of dinner. Truffles, wagyu, and caviar are absent - Matsuzaki “doesn’t give a fuck about the Western palate,” co-owner Josh Foulquier tells me. Good edomae sushi bars age their fish for flavor here, the chef goes further, fermenting sea urchin until it takes on the dense, creamy texture of pureed liver. Bluefin tuna makes up just two silky bites in the extended tasting. Crunchy sweets come before savory courses. That shiitake is just one bite among 27 or so courses it’s a meal with more unexpected twists than a Knives Out murder mystery. It’s not so much an actual mushroom as a fantastical vision of one, winnowed down into a three-line poem. The texture wobbles like panna cotta the vinegared rice adds a coarseness, followed by a whiff of spruce that lingers. He then adds a scattering of bamboo salt - and that’s it. The chef steams a humble shiitake before letting it rest in rice oil. ![]() That mushroom sushi, for starters, isn’t a fancy matsutake or maitake. Chef Junichi Matsuzaki plays by very different rules than his peers, offering one of New York’s longest and most unconventional tasting menus. Still, I’ll argue that a morsel of mushroom sushi is at least one reason folks pay vast sums to dine at Noz 17, a Toyota Corolla-sized restaurant that serves just seven diners at a time. The city’s decadent crop of expensive omakase parlors lure in patrons with familiar doses of opulence, dishing out charcoal-torched bluefin, uni as creamy as soft serve, and hand rolls teeming with caviar. If you wanted to get a handle on the human psychology behind $1,000 sushi dates, you probably wouldn’t look to a piece of vegan nigiri.
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