15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Omakase Has Gotten Out of Hand. Mori Nozomi Is the Sublime Answer.
Start with chawanmushi, trembling under a bitter ginkgo nut. Next, the supple muscle of snapper, luminous with yuzu. When the fish is gone, a server recalibrates the sauce that's left with dashi, so you can drink it. (Yes, you want to drink it.)
The chef Nozomi Mori is at work behind the counter: She etches her blade into the milky top of a scallop so it yields its sweetness more immediately. She carves sheer petals out of swordtip squid — changing the way you'll receive it — before pressing it into an airy cushion of rice.
At her eight-seat sushi counter Mori Nozomi, Ms. Mori is serving a 26-course omakase with precise control of texture and seasoning, cooking with a deep intelligence for the mechanics of tongue and teeth, for the sensual machinery of the mouth. (How many chefs forget about this? Let's be honest, how many chefs never understood it to begin with?)
Los Angeles is the sprawling sushi capital of the country, bending and breaking so many of the rules established for it in Japan, even as it replicates others. Before the chef Niki Nakayama was known for her Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant n/naka, she had a sushi bar on Melrose Avenue where Japanese men would sometimes walk in, see who was cooking — a woman? — and turn right around.
Excluding women from sushi might be seen as part of the tradition of sushi. It's why, a quarter of a century later, Ms. Mori still draws attention for her all-women team. But the thrill of Mori Nozomi is in Ms. Mori's distinct style as a chef — the way she annotates the singular focus of the omakase with some of the more complex, seasonal digressions of kaiseki and rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony.
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