“People always say summer is not a good time for sushi,” Derek Wilcox said. “I have no idea what they’re talking about.”
Early evening, the end of August, and the granite TriBeCa sidewalks outside Shoji at 69 Leonard Street were deserted. The restaurant was empty, too. I sat alone on one side of the counter, and on the other stood Mr. Wilcox, alone, as he usually is even when customers occupy all 12 chairs. Although assistants work in the wings, the restaurant is essentially a one-man show.
In the broad view, having the place to myself was unjust. In the year since Mr. Wilcox took over the restaurant — at first his work there was termed a residency or pop-up, but in June the owner, Idan Elkon, announced that he’d put a ring on it and made the arrangement permanent — he has firmly placed it in the top tier of the city’s Japanese restaurants. On the basis of sushi alone, Shoji has few plausible rivals, and for sushi embedded within a longer, kaiseki-derived menu, it has no parallel. There should be no empty seats, no matter how many New Yorkers are off lolling at the beach.
Taking a selfish view, though, I wasn’t particularly unhappy to be the only customer. Mr. Wilcox, who grew up in Virginia, cooked at a kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto called Kikunoi for seven years and then spent three more at a traditionalist sushi parlor in the Ginza district of Tokyo. You might think of this as the equivalent of earning a master’s degree followed by a Ph.D. in Japanese cuisine, and one side benefit of a meal across the counter from Mr. Wilcox is the chance to hear what he learned studying abroad.
Show some curiosity and you could get a short education in the mineral-rich clay used by potters in the town of Shigaraki, or the various aliases and false names under which a particularly delicious, pink-fleshed fish known as akamutsu in Japan travels under when it is away from home. On this August night, I was about to get a two-hour schooling on the pleasures of summer sushi.
Mr. Wilcox’s opening move was a squiggle of what looked like short, thick noodles and turned out to be lengths of chilled eggplant; Mr. Wilcox had given them a cool bath in the light sauce in which icy coils of somen noodles are dipped in summer. Laid over the top were two tongues of bafun sea urchin, a species with the color of a nearly ripe persimmon. With one dish, he had shooed away the heat outside, shown off the uncanny harmony of urchin and eggplant, and introduced a minor theme of the night, the summer urchin harvest in Japan.
This overture out of the way, Mr. Wilcox lifted what appeared to be a machete. This was a hamo knife, a heavy swath of sharp steel that can reduce the daggertooth pike conger’s dozens of tiny bones to edible smithereens; before the first one was forged in the 19th century, he explained, the eel had to be fully cooked and separated from its skeleton. This hamo would be quickly scorched on one side and served with a lick of wasabi and puréed salt-cured plums thinned with dashi.
Sashimi came next in the form of shioko, or kanpachi caught when it is young and its flavor is leaner and softer than it will get later in the year. This was followed by a local fish that in the spring Mr. Wilcox had told me he didn’t like, striped bass. He had been working with it, though, salting it overnight and then grilling it until the skin crackled. Now I don’t want striped bass cooked any other way. After this was Mr. Wilcox’s nod to the kaiseki tradition known as takiawase, a plate of simmered vegetables and, in this case, seafood: a small potato, some Japanese eggplant, a crisp pink ginger shoot and the most flavorful piece of octopus I have ever put in my mouth.
After my first meal at Shoji I learned to hope that chawan mushi, a bowl of steaming-hot tofu custard, was on the menu. In spring Mr. Wilcox made it with spot prawns, but tonight, in homage to clambake season, he was serving lobster chawan mushi.
To this point, the menu had faithfully followed kaiseki’s ritualized sequence of courses and its stopwatch-precise attention to seasonality. It was about to veer in a different direction, but it was enough to suggest that Mr. Wilcox could open a kaiseki restaurant that would set a new standard in the city. I’m not sure the city would support it, but it would be spectacular while it lasted.
The different direction, of course, was sushi. Accounting for just about half the Shoji menu, the sushi portion is briefer and offers less variety than the full monty at, say, Sushi Amane or Ginza Sushi Onodera. But I’m not sure any competitor outflanks Shoji on the quality of the seafood it does serve, or in the timeliness with which it serves up exactly the specimens most worth tracking down at any given moment.
In spring, when bioluminescent firefly squid are spawning in Japanese bays, Mr. Wilcox gets them. In August, when cuttlefish are thumbnail size, unbelievably smooth and as meltingly soft as the thinnest sheet of nova at Russ & Daughters, he will lay three of those over a single finger of rice.
He tracks bluefin that has been caught from healthy stocks, like the o-toro from Ireland that he served last spring and that was so seductive it could have been captioned “the guy she told you not to worry about.”
While in Japan, Mr. Wilcox learned to make fresh ikura from sacs of salmon roe, a slow process that requires massaging the eggs apart by hand in many changes of water. Normally the roe is then heavily cured with sugar and salt, but the roe he was serving last month was very lightly seasoned before being spooned into a shot glass and served as is — sticky, fatty, sweet and fresh.
After the last piece of fish, the kaiseki format kicks in again with a soup, which may be as simple as a classic bowl of miso or may break with tradition, like the extraordinary corn soup I ate in August. There will be something cold and refreshing, maybe a granita made from ginger or matcha, and finally a more substantial dessert. Sometimes this is a sort of tart with seasonal fruit — candied kumquats, maybe, or white peaches and blueberries — arranged in a mochi wafer called monaka.
For all this the charge is $252, service included. A shorter menu is available at $190, or a longer one at $295, again with service included. That service is somewhat minimal; lately it has meant a single employee assiduously refilling water glasses and taking orders from a drinks list whose cheapest item is a $12 bottle of beer.
Could my server have been more adept at deciphering the wines, sakes, shochus and Haitian rums Mr. Elkon and Mr. Wilcox have put together? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t necessarily want the scene cluttered by a sommelier in full pocket-square-and-cuff-links regalia. More employees hovering at the counter might take away from the bond Mr. Wilcox builds with the people he feeds.
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