Only 16 People a Night Can Eat This 17-Course Omakase

[gentle music]

Royal Sushi & Izakaya is a passion project.

Under one roof you have a boisterous izakaya

with some great food.

Tucked away behind the noren curtains of the izakaya,

I have my omakase service.

Omakase literally means, I'll leave it up to you.

So it's a chef experience

where you get to see the chef's vision.

And there I do my 17-course $300 omakase

for 16 people a night, eight people a seating.

Every chef's dream is to have both things, right?

You want a fun, loud, volume-packed place.

In the same space, I have my very serious

chef tasting meal where I get to make the food I want.

You know, I get to control everything.

And that's, I think, a chef's dream to have both.

[funky music]

[lantern thuds] [Jesse laughing]

Hey, I am Jesse Ito.

I'm the chef owner here at Royal Izakaya.

10 hours before omakase service,

fish is coming in right now from Japan.

Let's bring it on in.

[jazzy music]

This is Nobu.

He's the owner of Yama Seafood.

He distributes to some of the best

Japanese restaurants in the area.

This was caught on Sunday in Japan,

packed on Monday in Toyosu.

Brought to the airport,

and then it arrived last night at JFK.

A few hours later, brought it over to you.

[Jesse] Today is Tuesday, yeah.

This bill's pretty big.

It's so long that it's on a two-pager.

That's pretty big. $7,400.

Not your biggest, but-

Yeah, but that's just for today.

There's three more deliveries.

[funky music]

Tuna lifting.

[grunts] My god, it's heavy.

[funky music continues]

It's nine o'clock.

Fish just got dropped.

It can't stay on the ice too long,

otherwise it damages the fish.

I have to get it out, cleaned, gutted, scaled, prepared.

Some's gonna go in the Dry Ager,

or some's gonna go in the walk-in.

A lot of it will be used for tonight's service.

Here are some farm mackerel.

Mackerel is my favorite fish.

It's oily, it's fatty.

I also gravitate towards fish that I think are a challenge

for the, like, American palate.

Growing up in my dad's restaurant,

mackerel was a fish that a lot of customers

immediately said No to.

They probably had a bad experience.

It's a very technical fish because of the oil content.

It has to be extremely fresh.

That fish gets salt cured.

It gets vinegar soaked.

I like a good challenge.

I like to let diners know that

things they may not have thought they like,

they actually love.

This is the Kue.

Japanese longtooth grouper.

This one's gonna get aged for at least a week.

You can kind of see it's already in rigor.

You gotta handle with care

'cause this could easily just mess up your whole day.

So what they've done here, this little chop,

and you see there's a little hole here.

This is the ikejime process.

That's a Japanese technique.

They stick a metal rod down the spine to kill the nerves.

Keeps the fish from decomposing so quickly.

You can tell an immediate difference

when you work with a fish that's ikejime and one that's not.

The flesh kind of tears a bit

for the ones that have not been processed that way.

Whereas this one, if I were to cut into it today,

it's like, it's just so pristine, so tight.

[funky music]

I got a ton of fish I gotta break down right now.

I usually have a couple more hands.

But since we have so much fish,

I came in a little early to get started.

But between three sushi chefs,

we usually spend about four hours getting all this fish

broken down, sorted out, plus a couple more hours

of skinning, slicing, getting ready for service.

I always start my fish prep with the fish

that have to get salted or cured first

'cause that takes time.

So we're gonna start with the Spanish mackerel.

Alright, so first part cleaning process,

we always cut the fins off.

You just wanna get as much of the guts out as possible

because that's what really rots it very quickly.

Salt curing, what it does is essentially

pull out a lot of the excess moisture.

Mackerels, it's important

because we're gonna vinegar soak later.

So it allows the vinegar to penetrate easier and better.

So that's gonna salt cure for about 20 minutes.

So lemme get the squid out.

This is the Aori Ika, the bigfin reef squid.

I love using this squid specifically from Japan.

This one is super meaty, sweet, delicious.

You cannot get this from America, this squid.

Yeah, this is a $72 squid [chuckles]

to understand this cost.

Woo.

There we go, ink sac intact.

You do not want to pop that [chuckles].

This is the spine.

This is the only kind of, like, bone in this squid.

I guess it's not a bone.

It's like cartilage.

The squid has millions of layers of skin on it.

But you just take a towel or paper towel

and if you just go like this, you see this film like that,

you want to get this layer off.

Rubbing squid skin off,

sticking my hand in fish stomachs

to take all the guts out, like, that's my zen time.

So Ishigakidai, spotted knifejaw bream,

also known as barred knifejaw bream

because of these crazy spines it has.

This is one of my favorite fish to work with.

I'm using it for the omakase this season.

This one's gonna get aged,

so it has to get cleaned very well.

This process, Sukibiki, is the knife scaling.

Just removes the scales off of the skin.

Fish like this one, this Ishigakidai,

you have to do it this way

because the scales are so compact

that if you use another scaling tool,

they just won't come off

and they'll end up all over your cutting board.

You have to do the entire thing by hand.

So this is gonna take a bit of time.

[funky music]

Growing up in my dad's restaurant,

my dad's from Kyushu, Japan.

He's a classically trained Japanese chef.

My mom's from Seoul, Korea.

They opened a restaurant in 1979,

one of the first Japanese restaurants

in South Jersey called Fuji.

I started working there when I was 14,

so I learned everything,

like the foundation of what I know there.

These fish heads, we actually save them and the collars,

and we're gonna use them in the izakaya.

They're gonna be fried.

It's a dish called Kabutoyaki, served with a ponzu sauce.

And the best meat available for a great price.

So we cross utilize a lot of things so there's zero waste.

[gentle music]

It's 10 o'clock.

I'm gonna break down the tuna upstairs.

I did what I had to do down here.

This is like 120 pounds.

It's from a 500-something pound fish from Spain.

All right, here we are.

This is the sushi bar.

This is where the omakase happens.

I do two seatings a night, 17 courses.

Gotcha. One, two, three.

[grunting] Oh my god.

That is a big tuna.

This is the belly cut.

All of this right here, this is otoro.

This is the super fatty tuna belly.

And all of here, this is gonna be totoro.

and this is the akami, the lean part.

This is the kama.

So this does have kama toro here.

This is good if you grill it or torch it.

It has a lot of muscle tendon.

So it's very chewy but delicious if you cook it.

When I do this, I'm measuring for a saku cut.

So this is like the length of the filet

you wanna work with for sushi.

When it gets cut into that like long rectangular shape,

this is the size of it.

So I'm gonna just cut it down in usable chunks.

[funky music]

Parts of it that are more chewy,

the tail end or end bits,

that'll be put off to one of my sous chefs.

Some of it's gonna get dry aged,

some of it's gonna get used today,

and some of it's not gonna get dry aged.

It's gonna be stored and probably used tomorrow.

This loin right here is $2,500.

Yeah, this is $2,500 of fish.

Tuna is a quintessential sushi fish

because of just the flavor.

I mean, when you eat bluefin tuna like this,

there is nothing that tastes like this.

The umami, the depth of flavor, the fattiness, the richness.

This paired with nice acidic rice, soy sauce,

it's like the perfect bite.

This is a special paper called Magu Roll paper.

Each roll costs $10.

I mean it's a highly absorbent, thick paper

that just maintains the quality of fish,

especially for tuna, but we use it for everything.

So 120 pound of that bluefin,

we're gonna go through that in five days.

Truly wild.

Go, birds.

So this here is Edwin.

He is one of our sushi apprentices here.

He's gonna be wrapping all the tuna

to put her away in the walk-in.

That's it for the breakdown as of right now.

It'll continue through the day,

but I'm gonna get the rice started

since that takes some time.

[rock music]

Okay, it's 11 o'clock.

Let's start washing.

We do three batches of this a day.

But my omakase rice, I use a special grain, special vinegar.

This is called the hitomebore.

It means, Love at first sight.

This is my Akazu rice vinegar.

It has to stay closed and contained

to keep the acidity of the vinegar.

You can't keep it open.

This is the rice washing process.

Sushi rice is a little sticky.

It's mainly because of just this natural starch on the rice.

You see the starch coming off right now.

You don't want to be too sticky

where it looks like unmoldable.

You also don't want it to be too soft, too hard.

So it's so technical to get this part right.

I always equate nigiri to clay work,

which is what I love doing, pottery.

You're just molding the rice.

And the better the rice, like, the better clay,

the better your product.

But this is the most technical part of the day, actually.

Rice is way more important than the fish.

Obviously you need great fish,

great product to make great sushi,

but if you don't have good rice,

it doesn't matter how good the fish is.

So rice is straining for eight minutes.

[timer dinging]

Hey, timer just went off.

Gotta cook the rice.

This is the rice net.

We use the net so we can easily pull it out.

Otherwise the rice kind of sticks to the pot.

Do 36 minutes in this gas cooker.

Always double check that the flame's on.

In the beginning, I have hit that switch

and the flame did not go on.

And then 36 minutes later,

you're left with some really wet, raw rice,

and a really, really messed up day [laughs].

[chill music]

While the rice is cooking, let's go over here.

This is another sushi apprentice, Elmer.

He's been with us for over a year,

started as a dishwasher, super skilled.

He is taking all that toro,

that muscle part that's super chewy, scraping it all out.

And then he's gonna go in it again

to take out even more connective tissue.

So it's like a super labor intensive process.

This takes a lot of time, a lot of effort.

But if a restaurant can do this,

that's how you utilize a whole tuna.

Rice is cooking.

While that's cooking, this is the Dry Ager.

Dry Ager, built for beef.

But I mean I think...

And fish, okay.

Dry aging, what it does is it concentrates the flavor.

This [grunts]...

This is the Kue.

You saw one of these earlier.

So you can kind of see how it's

completely dried out, leathered out.

This is the Ishigakidai.

The way we cut it, we retain the flavor

we're gonna use later.

So looks like I'm like

the fish Hannibal Lecter in a way, right?

This is the [grunts] aged bluefin tuna.

Beautiful piece, so we're gonna use this tonight.

I'm gonna cut into it.

I've got 15 minutes till the rice is done

and I'm gonna have to do the shari-zu,

so let's break this down.

This is not every day that I use aged tuna.

I just started incorporating it.

It's very different than beef.

There's no fungus or mold that you're trying to build up.

That doesn't form on here and you don't want it.

I mean, this is gonna be eaten raw.

[timer dinging]

Coming through, rice.

Here, here.

[chill music]

Rice is cooked.

This is the shari-zu.

This is the process of incorporating

my rice vinegar mixture into the rice.

It has to happen right now when it's steaming.

This process is important, one, for germification.

The acidity prevents it from building up mold,

or building up any bacteria.

The other process is it encapsulates every grain of rice

and it protects the flavor,

and it makes it super malleable, so.

This thing, the hangiri is made of Japanese cypress wood,

super resistant to rot, warping, mold.

And it doesn't have so much of a fragrance,

so it's great to do rice in it.

This thing itself, this size is like five, $600.

So these things you try to keep for years.

What a lot of people don't know about sushi

is sushi actually means sour rice.

So originally before nigiri sushi became a thing,

where it's press-molded, where I do at omakase,

sushi was a fermented fish.

They took fish, they took rice, salt, vinegar,

and they essentially barreled it up for years.

And the lacto-fermentation from the rice

would ferment the fish and then they would grill it later.

So we're gonna let this sit for about 10 minutes,

air out, flip it, then put it in the warmer.

[funky music]

All right, one o'clock.

Still a lot to do, but caviar should be here any minute.

Hi, Gary. Hey!

Yeah. What's going on?

[Jesse] Got the goods?

I brought you some of the delicious caviar.

We got the premium Oscietra from Italy.

Very nice texture.

We're gonna use these in the next five days

between omakase and Izakaya.

So on any given piece, you're probably gonna get

like that much caviar.

I don't believe in like...

I hate it when you get like two grains,

and I'm like, What is that, so.

[Gary] Amazing.

It's perfect, thanks.

Like always.

[chill music]

It's 1:30.

It's time to get slicing on some of this fish.

Get ready for service.

So first I'm gonna start with

the King salmon belly from New Zealand.

This is a yanagi Japanese fish slicer, single bevel.

It's a special Damascus metal.

You can kind of see that design, it's made from Honyaki.

This one takes like a year or two to get.

I like it 'cause it's just very agile.

I do a lot of unique slicing based on the fish,

based on the way it eats, the texture,

if it's gonna get torched or not, presentation.

You'll see some pieces get double cut.

That's either for looks or it's also

in case there might be a pin bone that broke off.

So if you do a double slice, you'll catch that.

It also just looks so pretty.

I'll say omakase sushi is just raw fish.

That's why you gotta make it look pretty.

It's only eight seats, it's only 16 seats a night.

It's only one of me.

[chill music]

It's 2:45.

We're in the izakaya.

I'm here with Chef Justin.

He runs the izakaya menu.

I run the omakase.

Justin and I have been working together for a few years now.

He's super talented.

We, you know, depend on each other

for each other's opinions on the food.

It's nice to kind of have that backing,

or that person to bounce ideas off of them.

So we're doing Yaki Gyūtan, which is grilled beef tongue.

We braised the beef tongue

and then it is marinated in mirin, soy, and sake.

And then there's two sauces.

There's a salsa matcha, and then there's a Shio Negi,

which is like the traditional Japanese

garnish for this dish.

Charred scallion, raw garlic, sesame,

some lime to tie the two sauces together.

That sounds really amazing.

So while I'm a sushi chef, restaurateur type of person,

I also love photography and I do all the social media

photography for the restaurants.

So let's head on upstairs to get this shot.

[funky music]

So we're in my office right now,

we're staying right on top of the izakaya.

This is where I do all my photography

to get all the specials done, to get the menu photographed.

I got my light box here, big diffuser.

This is my Cannon R6 Mark II.

I just upgraded, finally.

I go for up close and personal.

Normally if we have a izakaya special,

I'll set aside about 10, 15 minutes to get it photographed.

I do have to upload this on my computer, get it edited.

I'll send it over to my GM, Nicole,

and she'll get it up on Instagram.

It's 3:25.

We still got a lot more to do.

What I'm working on right now is the omakase menu.

It's dated, so I do it every day.

And obviously there might be some changes.

I have to do it right now to get it to the team

so they can print it, get it folded,

stamped, and ready to go.

So let's get going.

Four o'clock.

Let's pop into the kitchen.

This is my father, Masaharu Ito.

He's from Japan.

He taught me everything I know.

Sushi master making the Tamagoyaki for tonight.

This is a very technical thing.

He's way better than me.

Not exactly, I think he doing very well.

I think couple more years to come, his prime time will come.

He have to think about what he gonna do rest of life.

[Masaharu laughs]

But I'm very happy right now.

Working with my dad in this context is much easier.

You know back in the day when he was teaching me,

I was a resentful, young, cocky kid [laughs].

Now it's great.

He gets to go home early.

I handle all the problems and it feels good.

This Tamagoyaki is essentially

like a sweet, savory egg omelet.

It's the most technical egg omelet you can make

just because of the motion required to do it.

You can see he's kinda doing this flipping motion

in a square copper Tamagoyaki pan.

So it's very technical, very hard to get that motion down.

[gentle music]

Okay, it's 4:30.

I'm going upstairs to take a 20 minute break.

It's the only time I get.

So let's go.

I'm gonna eat my lunch.

[gentle music continues]

Okay, five o'clock.

Got my break, ready to do final prep.

We got an hour to go, 30 minutes till pre-shift.

So I just have a couple things I still have to cut.

I got the squid, I got the live scallop,

boton ebi the shrimp.

Been doing this for a long time,

but there is a lot of pressure to execute.

[upbeat music]

It is 5:30, time for pre-shift.

I'm here with Samantha, she's my omakase server,

my wing man.

She's been here for seven years working with me.

What do we got tonight?

So two allergies tonight.

One guest at six o'clock has a mackerel allergy,

and another guest at six o'clock can not eat shrimp.

That is all.

Today we are booking Tuesday, February 20th

and Wednesday February 21st.

It's pretty far out.

[Samantha] That's the first date we have available.

Great.

For tonight, the shimeji, the kue, the ishigakidai,

nodoguro, and the akami and toro are all dry aged.

For add-ons, I have the A5 Wagyu,

caviar toro, Hokkaido uni, so I have a very special one

in case people want to get it.

We have the spicy crunchy tuna tamaki,

toro uni, caviar tamaki, and my dad's ponago.

It's 5:40.

We got 20 minutes till service starts.

Samantha, we can start seating 10 up, so in 10 minutes.

Otherwise, you know, we're about to do what we do every day.

The show begins soon.

[chill music]

Omakase is a performance in the sense that

everything leading up to it is very physical, technical,

fast-paced, precise work.

And the clock is just ticking, ticking, ticking.

And everything leads up to this one moment

where the show begins,

the guests are seated and we get going.

At that point, everything's pretty much prepared.

It's just assembling the nigiri.

But the assembly part is, to me, it's like a dance.

Kumamoto oyster with toro tartar to start.

You can use your hands.

Makes sure to do one bite, okay?

It's all best eaten in 30 seconds.

The omakase is also a performance in the sense that

I am directly engaging with all my customers.

I am live for them.

And if there's any type of emotion in the day,

or any type of thing that's on my mind,

I have to clear that and I have to be ready.

This is the Katsuo Tataki, charred Japanese bonito.

These people have waited months to get in

to experience this with me,

and they're paying a lot of money.

And it's important to make sure that

energy-wise and personality-wise,

I'm there too to be with them.

I want it to be a great experience.

And part of what makes omakase great

is you are right there with the chef

who you're watching them make every piece.

They can explain to you what's going on.

You get to see the process,

and they can explain to you the best way

to eat it in their mind.

And that's a very special connection.