Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?

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Critic’s Notebook

Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?

What began in Japan as a quick, exciting working-class meal has morphed in American cities into an elaborate pampering of the well-heeled diner.

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At many American omakase restaurants, the bill will be eye-popping and the bites will mostly be unchallenging crowd-pleasers.

Credit...

Ellen Silverman for The New York Times

By

Ligaya Mishan

Ligaya Mishan is a chief restaurant critic for The New York Times.

April 28, 2026,

5:03 a.m. ET

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Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same.

In a

1963 column

about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot.

By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “

Wall Street

,” was

churning out rice balls

eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.

That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by

finance bros

, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie

Benihana-fication

of the American sushi-ya.

I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to

Sushi Ike

, for those who know.)

Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at

Masa

on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

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