Sushi Taro

The Restaurant

Sushi Taro occupies the second floor of a corner building at 17th and P, two blocks east of Dupont Circle itself, and has held a Michelin star in every edition of the Washington DC Guide since the guide first arrived in the District. Owner-chef Nobu Yamazaki — a Tokyo-born second-generation restaurateur whose family ran the original Sushi Taro on the same block for two decades before he refit the dining room into its current sushi-counter format in 2008 — runs the kitchen with chef de cuisine Masa Kitayama. The room is small by design: forty-two covers split between an eight-seat sushi bar, a pair of private rooms with sunken kotatsu seating, and a dining floor that the staff still wax between services.

The kitchen serves three kaiseki tasting formats nightly: Kaiseki Tasting (cooked-driven), Sushi Kaiseki (sushi-driven), and Sashimi Kaiseki (sliced-raw driven). All three move through the same nine-to-eleven-course Edomae framework — sakizuke, hassun, mukozuke, owan, yakimono, mushimono, sunomono, gohan, mizugashi — and all three pivot on fish flown in three times a week from Toyosu, supplemented by a tight Atlantic-coast seasonal rotation. The à la carte sushi side of the menu runs forty-plus single-piece offerings, including unusual New England uni and Hokkaido botan ebi, and a Wagyu sukiyaki for the cooked-only ordering of small parties.

Service is at the upper tier of Japanese formal dining anywhere on the East Coast: career captains, jacketed runners, sake pours from a temperature-controlled cellar that holds about eighty-five labels, and a wine list that focuses on Burgundy, Champagne, and Riesling — the three categories that match a long kaiseki without competing with it. The kaiseki counter releases on Tock about thirty days in advance and fills within hours; the second-floor private rooms run separate Tock blocks for groups of six to ten. For an evening that needs to perform expertise without performing wealth, this is the Washington table.