Adam Platt likes the dining room at Sushi Nakazawa on Commerce Street, and he's wowed by the fresh fish served by Daisuke Nakazawa. The chef, who apprenticed under Jiro Ono, makes traditional-style sushi, as well as more playful creations:
Nakazawa has learned valuable lessons from his famous teacher. There's an impeccable freshness to the sushi here, and in contrast to the restaurant's frilly décor, most of the pieces I sampled had the kind of focused simplicity that you don't find at many sushi palaces. The lucent, icy-clear ikura (salmon roe) was some of the best I've ever tasted. So was the glittery, silver-skinned saba (mackerel), from Hokkaido, and the fatty o-toro-tuna-belly hand roll, which, Nakazawa merrily informed us, was wrapped in a crinkly blanket of the highest-grade toasted nori, harvested not from China, where most nori comes from, but from Tokyo Bay.Platt notes that some of the tuna dishes "weren't the absolute best I've tasted during the course of my greedy, o-toro-eating life." But he praises the beverage program, and he thinks that Sushi Nakazawa is "fairly priced by the stratospheric standards of the high-roller sushi world." The critic gives the restaurant three stars.
· At Sushi Nakazawa, Daisuke Nakazawa Is the Un-Jiro [GS/NYM]
· All Coverage of Sushi Nakazawa [~ENY~]
[Photo: Marguerite Preston]