My spouse and I dined at Masa for dinner on a Saturday
evening in mid-October 2018. Masa is open for lunch on Tuesdays through
Fridays, and dinner on Mondays through Saturdays. A few weeks before we dined,
we emailed the restaurant to make a reservation, and they sent us an email
reminder a few days prior. Although we specified in the email that we wanted to
sit at the sushi counter, when we arrived at the restaurant, the host planned
to lead us to a table. Fortunately, there was space at the counter, and we were
seated in our desired spot. (Had we sat in the dining room, we would have been
so disappointed! We love to interact with the sushi chefs and watch them work!)
Masa is located on the fourth floor of the Shops at Columbus
Circle/Time Warner Center, an upscale shopping mall and office building at the
intersection of West 59th Street and 8th Avenue. Other
high-end restaurants are located on the same floor, including Per Se (where we
ate in December 2009), Porter House (where we ate in August 2016), and Bar Masa
(where we ate in December 2011).
Guests enter Masa by walking through a traditional noren (a
fabric divider) and then through an intricate wooden door. Inside, the
restaurant is spacious, divided into two areas: a small dining room with
traditional blonde-wood tables and chairs, and the sushi counter (with 10 or 12
high leather chairs). The stunning sushi counter is a work of art – a solid
piece of Hinoki Cyprus that is sanded daily for a super-soft finish. (Its
estimated worth is a whopping $260,000!) Behind the bar, a seasonal tree provides
a focal point, and a wood-fired grill is located near it. Three sushi chefs
work at the counter, which displays huge blocks of ice to keep the fish cold.
We were fortunate to have the chef/owner Masayoshi Takayama (“Masa”) as our
chef.
Masa grew up in Japan and learned his craft from a sushi
master at Tokyo’s Ginza Sushi-ko. He moved to the US and opened a small
restaurant in Los Angeles that he named after his mentor. In 2004, he opened
Masa and Bar Masa in New York. (A second location of Bar Masa is located in Las
Vegas.) Chef also owns NYC’s Kappo Masa (where we ate in December 2017) and
Tetsu.
Dining at Masa has been on our bucket list for years, but we
felt that we had to wait for a really special occasion (like our joint 50th
birthdays!) to justify the astronomical price tag ($595 per person, which
includes gratuity but not beverages or taxes). Masa holds the distinction as
the most expensive restaurant in the United States, and one of the eight most
expensive restaurants in the world! We had been working ourselves up to Masa
after dining at other Manhattan Japanese restaurants like Kura (January 2015), O
Ya (January 2017), Jewel Bako (May 2017), Brushstroke (August 2016), and BONDST
(October 2017). Masa has held three Michelin stars for many years, as well as
three stars from the New York Times, and five stars from Forbes (formerly Mobil).
Masa serves Japanese cuisine in an omakase format, whereby
there is no written menu and no choices for diners to make; the chef selects
what he will feed you from seasonal products that are flown in daily from Japan
so that the fish is fresh and never frozen. Because photographs are forbidden
(we think not for the proprietary nature of what is served but because Chef
wants his guests to eat the food exactly when he presents it without pausing to
take pictures), we are relying on our memory of what was served.
We began with seven (7) composed dishes:
1. Kegani (hairy
crab) and uni on delicate cucumber salad
2. Caviar-topped
toro tartare with toast
3. Suzuki (sea
bass) sashimi with ponzu vinaigrette and shiso flowers
4. Crab leg with
broth
5. Roasted sea
urchin summer truffle
6. (Optional $150 per
person supplemental dish of Waygu beef with truffles, which we did not purchase)
7. Matsutake broth
Next we received about 16+ pieces of sushi, each crafted one
at a time and placed in front of us by the chef himself:
8. Toro (two
pieces)
9. Shima aji
(striped jack) nigiri
10. Hirame (fluke)
with grated turnip nigiri
11. Tai (sea bream)
nigiri
12. Kinme dai
(golden eye snapper) nigiri
13. Ika (squid)
nigiri with Himalayan salt
14. Amaebi (sweet
shrimp) nigiri from Hokkaido
15. Kuruma ebi
(Japanese imperial prawn) nigiri from Okinawa
16. Mirugai
(geoduck) nigiri
17. Suji (grilled
toro sinew/collar) with shaved green onion nigiri
18. Saba (mackerel)
nigiri
19. Another type of
saba (mackerel) nigiri
20. Grilled
shiitake mushroom nigiri
21. Anago (seawater
eel) nigiri
22. Uni handroll
23. Toro handroll
And then we finished with three (3) sweet/dessert courses:
24. Lotus root with
shiso and ume
25. Pear slices served
alongside soba-cha (buckwheat tea)
26. Matcha mille
feuille (green tea layered crepe cake)
After we finished our meal (two hours passed so quickly!) and
paid the bill (gulp!), Masa invited us to come behind the sushi counter and
have a photograph taken with him before we left. It was an amazing ending to a
fantastic meal!
