Sushi Nakazawa

On the Frequency of a Grain of Rice We just had a lovely evening at Sushi Nakazawa in Los Angeles You go in the way you go underwater. The door shuts on Robertson Boulevard and the ceiling rolls overhead in slow waves of concrete, blue and gold, and you sit looking up the way you look up from the bottom of a pool. My father was an architect. He said big ideas only happen under tall roofs. I thought of him the second I walked in, which does not usually happen to me over sushi. I paint, I make films and books, I cast bronze. I know what a poured surface costs. Somebody felt every wave of that ceiling. It is tasteful, not obvious, but the waves are there. You can almost taste the salt. Behind the stone is Daisuke Nakazawa, Jiro’s old apprentice, the one who cooked the same egg two hundred times before it was good enough. I believe the story, because I have lived the other end of it. I lost twenty years of work to a fire once and started the counting over. The slow work is never about the egg. It is about the years, and what the years do to your hands. The rice is the whole nomenclature here, the grain the old gods kept for the living. Warm as skin, every grain loose and standing alone, the vinegar so nuanced you feel it only as a ghost. I trust smell over memory, and that warm rice hit an old frequency in me I could not name. We do the same thing with corn in Mexico, where the maize is an ancestor and a god. One seed, a whole cosmos. Both of them, for a minute, at the counter with me. Then you eat, and silence. I do not know how they did it, but the volume is perfect. The room is alive and you can still have a conversation. Otoro like smoke. Eel soft as an offering. Each piece gone. Seven hundred years ago the monk Muqi painted six persimmons and then had the nerve to paint almost nothing else, and the nothing is the masterpiece. That is the grandfather of this food. Musashi said that from one thing you can know ten thousand. He could have meant a single piece of these beauties. A place is only its people. Dean guards the biggest sake list in California like a shaman who knows he will convert you. Anthony works the floor like your night is the only thing that matters, and means it. Alessandro, Vito, and Nakazawa spent years finding these exact humans, because you cannot fake grace, you find it one person at a time. Every one of them is seriously warm. They are a little obsessed, the good kind. I know that obsession from the inside. I looked at them and saw my own people. A confession. I go back further with this place than tonight, further than Los Angeles. My paintings hang on the walls of the private New York room. It started the way the best New York things do, with a bet nobody expected anyone to keep. Somebody kept it. I painted, the work went up, and a restaurant became a place with my own hand on its walls. I came to New York young, out of Mexico, by way of London, with not much, and I learned there are three cities wearing the same disasters. One sells the postcards. Another the tacos and The other keeps you alive, through a kindness nobody photographs, the kind that wants nothing back. Alessandro and Nakazawa gave me that kindness and never took it back. Now they have carried it across the whole country to Los Angeles, and walking into this blue cave and finding it already there, waiting for me, made me feel welcomed again. It made me feel human. That, more than any single piece of fish, is the best part of being here now. Do not wait. Figure out how to see that kindness, because it manifests in every morsel and every glass. ありがとうございました Leopoldo Goût

I haven’t been there but it’s my friends restaurant so I trust him

I absolutely loved my experience at this Japanese restaurant. The food was fresh, flavorful, and beautifully served. The teriyaki dishes and sushi platters were especially memorable because of their rich taste and presentation. The atmosphere was calm and elegant, while the customer service was outstanding from start to finish.

Only redeemable thing about this place is their hostess. Very underwhelming and really stuck up staff. Would not recommend.