In 1977, a friend asked if he would open a restaurant in Anchorage. In fact if you add together the number of Michelin 1-star French, Italian and Chinese it doesn’t equal the number of Japanese 1-stars.Three years after Nobu took the opportunity in Peru, the partnership failed. Italian, French and Chinese restaurants still account for a small percentage of Michelin star restaurants compared to Japanese.
In 2018, Masa is still one of five 3-stars and there is one new Japanese 2-star (Sushi Ginza Onodera) out of eleven total. Out of 56 Michelin 1-star restaurants, fourteen remain Japanese. (American restaurants and Steakhouses not surprisingly make up many of the 1-stars.) The 2018 Michelin guide for NYC is more or less the same. All 14 Japanese 1-stars are reviewed here. By comparison, Michelin only lists five 1-star Italian restaurants, and just two traditional French 1-stars. For Japanese restaurants in NYC, the 2017 Michelin guide listed: one 3-star (Masa), and out of a total of 61 Michelin 1-star restaurants, an astounding fourteen are Japanese. I am quite sure Michelin agrees with this assessment. But Japanese fine dining has been on a tear in New York City with more excellent choices than ever. Fine dining has been quiet, and not a lot has been happening with new French, Italian, American, or Chinese restaurants. Much of the NYC dining scene has been stagnant the last couple of years with most of the action occurring in the see-and-be-seen places. Eye-opening 15-course fugu dinners, my first all Sushi dinners, and of course multi-course kaiseki dinners served by authentic geishas.įast forward to 20. I was the guest of those same bankers and construction company executives and was treated to some of the great meals of my life. I was also lucky enough to go to Japan three or four times a year starting in 1987 until the mid 90’s. What could be better than exposing those clients to real Japanese cuisine? We went to places in midtown like Sushiden, Kitcho and Kuramazushi, which boasted top chefs from Tokyo. The top Tokyo-based restaurants of the time had followed their Japanese corporate clients to NYC, and those Japanese bankers and construction executives liked nothing more than spending lots of money taking their American clients out to dinner. By the early 1980’s a booming Japanese economy sent thousands of relatively well-to-do Japanese bankers and construction executives to NYC with big expense accounts. To this day much of the finer sushi grade fish served around the world is Japanese in origin.Īfter my brief foray into Japanese food in the early 1970’s courtesy of numerous visits to Benihana, it was not until the mid-1980’s that I rediscovered Japanese dining, especially Japanese fine dining. Sushi as a dish was originally called Edo-mae zushi for it’s origins from Edo, the old name for Tokyo and Tokyo Bay. The practice was that the customer arrived, was served, ate his sushi quickly and silently, and left. This is a long adoption period as sushi developed in the Edo (Tokyo) period of Japanese history in the 1820’s as quick, stall food. Sushi did not truly arrive in NYC until the late 1950’s and did not become ubiquitous until the early 80’s. While there are some reports of Japanese restaurants in NYC as early as the 1930’s, it was always Tempura or Sukiyaki cuisine until the late 1950’s. Japanese dining really did not come to NYC until the late 50’s and early 60’s. This was probably because of immigration patterns that saw most Japanese move to California. Of the world’s major types of cuisines (French, English, Mexican, Mediterranean, Italian, Chinese), Japanese food was the last to arrive to NYC.
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