Ichimura at Eleven Madison Park

Though he’s had places with his own name on the door, the sushi chef Eiji Ichimura has a habit of sheltering under the wings of his devoted fans. For one of New York’s sushi masters, he hasn’t got much public ego. In the early years of Ichimura’s New York fame, he was an if-you-know-you-know bragging right: During his years at David Bouley’s Brushstroke in the 2010s, in Tribeca, he quietly turned out excellent sushi under such a cloak of quiet that Pete Wells once marveled that the “emptiness of the room wasn’t just odd, it was plain wrong.” Brushstroke had been the home of a succession of Tokyo-trained sushi chef instructors — it was run in collaboration with the Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka — but once Ichimura’s fame was established, it soon became Ichimura at Brushstroke. In 2023, the chef opened his own Sushi Ichimura in Tribeca; that restaurant closed in 2025. Now it feels as if time has turned backward: Ichimura is once again in residence at a big-ticket New York institution, and for what may be the last moment, I’m not sure the world at large has noticed.

Ichimura’s devoted acolytes sure have. At my recent dinner at Ichimura’s open-ended residency at the Studio, a nine-seat dining counter above Eleven Madison Park, three of my fellow diners professed to have followed the sensei from restaurant to restaurant for years, like shad-sniffing bloodhounds. A meal at Ichimura is in line with the higher end of New York omakase, at $325 a head before à la carte additions, drinks, or gratuity, but I got the sense that for these partisans, resistance was futile. “This is my favorite kohada,” sighed a woman next to me in rapture, referring to Ichimura’s gizzard-shad sushi. The gizzard shad is a herring relative that is sometimes considered a test of a sushi master’s mettle. On its own, the fish is an untasty, blunt-nosed brack dweller. But with proper deboning, vinegaring, and time, it can be a little wonder. Ichimura’s arrives glintingly silver, its flesh slashed like a Lucio Fontana painting, sharp with vinegar, rich and just melting enough.

Ichimura’s is an edomae-style sushi, a callback to sushi’s 19th-century origins, dependent on preservation techniques only available then, primarily marination and kelp-pressing. Edomae puts a particular focus on rice, and Ichimura’s is delicious — toothsome and piquant. Unlike some of the more narrated omakases around, at Ichimura, don’t expect a lecture. The chef doesn’t say much, though if pressed, he’ll mumble a little description here and there: “Very small,” he explained of a kasugodai (young sea bream) or “Not a baby, this one” of a slice of sawara (Spanish mackerel), a much larger fish. Who needs it? It’s much more satisfying to watch him work, slicing away with a large knife before forming nigiri with such balletic, precisely articulated flexes of finger and palm that you could mistake it for crisp ASL.

An initial plan to accompany Ichimura’s sushi with dishes from Eleven Madison Park, kaiseki style, seems to have been scrapped. Ichimura now provides a few of his own non-sushi options to start and end the meal. His uni monaka — cold urchin with caviar sandwiched between two thin mochi wafers (the traditional monaka is sweet with red-bean paste in place of the uni) — is a cookie the Girl Scouts could start selling if they ever want to make real money. Dessert is a kind of frozen mandarin parfait, served in its rind. Daniel Humm, EMP’s chef and owner, seems content to offer the drinks and the mood: sake, Japanese whiskey, and, in a mood-elevating touch not often found at the omakase counters of my own experience, a soy-complementing soundtrack of soul from the ’70s.

Sea urchin and caviar inside a mochi wafer.
Photo: Jovani Demetrie