So Sumile: Fresh Alaskan king crab with green-yuzu gelee.   (Photo: Rick Lew)

The New Japanese Luxury Boom

If you’ve ever dined on chef Troy Dupuy’s inventive menu at LA CARAVELLE, or even visited the grand Boulud outlets like CAFÉ BOULUD and DANIEL, you know that Japanese influences have been seeping into classical gourmet cuisine for some time now. In 2004, however, this modest wavelet threatens to turn into an outright tsunami. In the West Village, crowds of food aesthetes are bull-rushing into the newly opened SUMILE, where chef Josh De Chellis serves up elaborate Franco-Japanese creations like Dungeness crab layered with yuzu gelée, coulis made from fresh uni (sea urchin), and decorous helpings of skate simmered with daikon and Japanese eggplant in a little porcelain pot.

Elsewhere, the city’s clique of elite Japanese food connoisseurs are murmuring expectantly about AQUAVIT chef Marcus Samuelsson’s soon-to-be-completed “American Japanese” restaurant, RIINGO, opening this week in the Alex Hotel, as well as the arrival in town of the eminent Tokyo sushi chef Masa Takayama. Takayama’s expensive new restaurant, ASAYOSHI, is scheduled to open this spring in the Time Warner Center food court, where, according to one press report, a top-of-the-line dinner will cost a cool $500 per head. If you can’t wait to blow that kind of cash, then ride the elevator up to the 35th floor of the new Mandarin Oriental hotel, also in the Time Warner Center, and agitate for a window table at the pricey, overbooked, and impressively snooty new restaurant ASIATE. The chef is Noriyuki Sugie, who comes to New York by way of Sydney, and if you’re lucky enough to get a view, it’s a curious, almost nostalgic pleasure to contemplate his intricate fusion recipes for bull-market classics like lobster (cooked in citrus-shellfish broth) and Kobe beef (smothered in oxtail gravy) while the lights of the glittering city play at your feet.