Tokyo’s High Rollers Could Enjoy Their Toro in Peace

BEFORE NOBU and Masa, the city’s sushi world was a smaller, more settled place. “The restaurants were very old-fashioned, they were in midtown, they were marketed mostly to Japanese businessmen, and these guys did not want to see any fucking white people in their restaurants,” recalls Nobu’s Drew Nieporent. Sushiden on East 49th Street was partially owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation; it was a forbidding oasis for salarymen dressed in their dark suits. Kurumazushi, which is still doing business in a small walk-up space on 47th Street, was the big-money venue where the sushi was stored in a golden box and the chef (who called his carefully selected fish “my jewels”) charged upwards of $200 for an omakase dinner when, as one sushi-snob friend remembers, “no one had ever heard of doing such a crazy thing.” Then there was Hatsuhana, on East 48th Street, a slightly less severe, more eclectic establishment, which thanks to a glowing review by Mimi Sheraton became a kind of proving ground for influential members of the city’s avid sushi community. Ruth Reichl, who honed her taste for sushi while living in L.A., recalls seeing the novelist Renata Adler silently communing with her omakase dinner at the bar. Reichl had been introduced to the restaurant by her father, who worked around the corner, and they used to dine with the rest of the gaijin crouched at one of the darkly lit tables downstairs. She only managed to ascend to the bar upstairs when she went to work for the New York Times and acquired an expense account. “My husband used to eat tuna, some yellowtail, maybe a little bit of eel, and then he’d leave,” she recalls. “I would stay and our regular chef, Mr. Osada, would give me the most exotic things—fermented squid guts, little tiny crabs that were deepfried, which you couldn’t get anywhere else in the city.” As with higher-end enclaves in Japan, ingredients were never bragged about at Hatsuhana (it was a given that the toro belly was the best), and the key to happiness was a special relationship with a chef like Osada. “I used to give him bottles of Johnny Walker Blue at Christmas,” Reichl recalls. If she showed up when he wasn’t working, the authorities would seat her ignominiously at one of the tables. Like Le Pavillon in the French realm, Hatsuhana helped an entire genre achieve gourmet status, and chefs who worked there went on to open other influential spots, including the great Sushi Yasuda five blocks south. A.P.