Best Sushi Restaurants in New York 2026

Shion Uino spent eight years at the right hand of Takashi Saito in Tokyo before opening 69 Leonard at the end of 2021. The room is hinoki, the counter is six seats on one side and a private alcove on the other, and the progression is twenty courses of which roughly twelve are nigiri. The kohada (gizzard shad) lands third — vinegar-cured to a five-day window, the kind of fish that exposes whether a chef has trained at Saito or trained on YouTube. The aged otoro is brushed with nikiri, not poured. The shari is warmer than New York is used to.

Keiji Nakazawa ran the original Sushi Sho in Yotsuya for thirty-one years before the New York counter opened in 2021. The lineage is consequential — Daisuke Nakazawa (Sushi Nakazawa, West Village) is his protégé, and roughly a third of the Edomae chefs in Manhattan have studied under one of the two. The signature is the layered chirashi he developed in Tokyo in the early 1990s: ten or eleven small piles of seafood, each dressed differently, that the chef will tell you to eat in a specific order. The shari is older than at any other New York counter — closer to four hours of fermentation than two.

Masa is the most expensive serious restaurant in North America. The room is twenty-six seats around a hinoki counter so wide and so empty it has its own gravity; the menu is whatever Masa Takayama feels like preparing, drawn from a fish list that arrives from Toyosu twice a week and from a wagyu programme that includes a private cut not sold elsewhere in the city. The toro tartare with caviar has been on the menu since the room opened in 2004 and it remains the test course. Three Michelin stars, year after year, since the inaugural New York guide.

Nozomu Abe imported the actual counter from Japan when he opened on 78th Street in 2018: hinoki cypress, hand-finished, two hundred years old. The room seats eight and runs two seatings a night. Abe came up under Tomoharu Nakamura at Hatsuhana before his own counter; the discipline shows in his cure schedule — saba (mackerel) brined for forty minutes precisely, kohada cured five days, anago simmered in the morning and served at body temperature in the evening. One Michelin star since the 2020 guide; in our scoring it sits a hair below Sho and 69 Leonard on the strength of a slightly less ambitious tuna programme.

Daisuke Nakazawa is the apprentice from Jiro Dreams of Sushi who, after a decade at Sukiyabashi Jiro and a stint at Sushi Sho with Keiji Nakazawa, opened a 23-seat counter on Commerce Street in 2013. It earned the Michelin star in its opening year. The omakase at the counter is $185 — a number that has not moved meaningfully in three years and is genuinely the best price-to-rice ratio in Manhattan for serious Edomae. The signature is the warm-rice course: shari held just below skin temperature, served with anago glazed in a tsume that Daisuke reduces from heads and bones each morning.

Eiji Ichimura was the original sushi chef at Brushstroke and ran Ichimura at Brushstroke through its Michelin-starred years; in 2022 he reopened upstairs at Uchu, in a ten-seat hinoki room that operates almost independently of the downstairs French-Japanese tasting menu. His tuna ageing programme — chu-toro held in salt for between three and ten days before service — is the most ambitious in the city and the reason to come. The shari is vinegared with red akazu, not white, which is unusual in New York and a meaningful difference if you've eaten in Ginza. Uchu carries two Michelin stars in the 2024 guide.

The Chef's Table has held three Michelin stars since 2014 — a tenure that survived a kitchen change in 2023 when Max Natmessnig took over from César Ramirez. The format is a roughly twenty-course French-Japanese tasting at an eighteen-seat hinoki counter, with the second half of the menu — eight to ten courses — built around nigiri and Edomae preparations. Sourcing comes from Toyosu twice weekly. The price is gentler than Masa for what is, arguably, more ambitious cooking; the only reason it doesn't outrank the pure sushi counters above is that purists come for rice, and half this menu is consommé and confit.

Nobu Downtown is in this list to be talked out of. Nobu Matsuhisa's New York rooms — Downtown, 57, the Park Avenue branch — have been built around miso black cod, yellowtail tiradito, and a wood-fire programme that owes more to Lima than to Tokyo. The sushi case is competent and properly sourced; it is also the third-best reason to come. If a colleague pitches "let's do sushi tonight" and means the kind of evening where ten people share six dishes and three bottles of Brunello, Nobu Downtown is correct. If they mean "let's eat nigiri," book Sushi Nakazawa.