Shinn East - 8.7

119 E 7th St, New York, NY

White Hot

5:53. Conor is outside, tapping his wrist. We’re seven minutes early, which, at Shinn East, is terribly late. Conor, ever my voice of civility, says I oughtn’t drink my 16floz bud light directly in front of the restaurant. I briefly protest, but only performatively, I can’t set a precedent of quiet capitulation. Heal-toe back to the corner, pelican swallows under the blinking red hand. Wow, that is carbonated. “Conor, you gotta give me a minute.”

5:55. Shinn East’s central gimmick is the 50-minute hard cap, whose rigidity allows them to price 13 pieces of heavyweight sushi at just $69. This means moving with tempo, all hare, no tortoise. Peering inside, the chefs and waitstaff are erasing any evidence of the 5 pm seating. With only ten minutes between rounds, there is a militaristic stiffness to their maneuvers, as if each table-wiping motion were pre-rehearsed, serially optimized, and precisely accounted for in the Ledger of No Wasted Movements.

5:56. I grant myself the remaining four minutes to wonder about the profitability of speed. In general, restaurants play for volume: a moderately sized French bistro is paying such high overhead (10 bodies in the back, 10 running food, and another 10 bussing tables and making drinks), that they have to clear 200+ covers a night to even smell a profit. Omakase flips the economics: though they can only seat a small handful of diners, they save massively by employing only 1-4 chefs and 1-2 (if any) servers. But Shinn East is an experiment in calling heads and tails: they capture the volume value by squeezing 24 chairs into the bar and hurrying customers out the door, which allows them to pack up to 144 customers every night—New York omakase bars rarely get more than 36 (3 seatings of 12). Add in alcohol and those $69 checks pile up quickly. And they double down on the traditional Omakase cost savings by limiting their staff to 2 waiters and 2 chefs, who, frankly, seemed more like the chef’s middle school friends than master artisans.

5:58 To get a rough comparison, I used Resy to estimate how many seats different Omakase bars are filling on an average night. Then I add in Shinn East’s clever trick of allowing all diners to purchase any of the previous rolls a la carte at the end—the average diner orders at least one.

By enticing customers with such a low price-tag then and time constricting the experience so tightly, Shinn East takes in nearly as much money as some of the hottest and most accredited sushi restaurants in New York. And this doesn’t even touch the profit question. Higher-ticket places like The Office of Mr. Moto probably doled out hundreds of thousands to build their interiors like bamboo temples, Shinn East looks more like an Ikea staging set.

6:00. Time’s up. Ushered inside. Menu in our hands before our bodies connect with the chair. “What would you like to drink?” the waitress asks. Her face blinks red with the time-sensitive austerity of a small island nation with a quickly-approaching IMF repayment date. Answer, her eyes demand: now, sooner, nower, faster, please. Rosé sake, I select blindly. She returns with a can. Fortunately for her I am not precious about such things.

Over the counter, the chef is wielding slices of fish like a toddler petting a dog too hard. His sushi movements originate in the muscular heat of his arms, not the delicacy of his hands. Hirame on the plate. Hirame in my mouth. A delicate bounce on the carved muscle, a crisscross lattice has been sliced at the shallowest level of flesh, and a dried rose petal lay flat on top. A resting ladybug. Such an airy subtlety to the fish’s flavor, this is to most fish what a Pacific breeze is to a window unit air conditioner.

No time for subtlety. Perfect pearls of Ikura up next. Traditional Japanese sushi chefs can spend weeks learning to squeeze out a towel before they’re even allowed to touch food. They spend many more months making only eggs. It is often years before they are invited to engage with the fish. Here, the mission is this: get the fish from the back of the bar to the front of the bar. Every component of the menu sits cleanly in one of the chef’s many metal bins, who works with the repetition of a pre-programmed tool: select.fish(Sweet shrimp), rice.shape(), wasabi.rub(), garnish.dollup(), plate().

Sweet shrimp is in my mouth. My mouth is now a polite storm of sweet electric pink. Cotton candy flavors roll around like teenage love.

Otoro with caviar next. Dear fucking god. If Eve did all that for an apple, who would be safe if she’d been tempted with this luscious parallelogram of pink brain matter, coaxed atop a sticky beignet of glossed rice, decorated with a rough pile of caviar pearls, shining that ocean-floor wetness like lentil-sized river stones?

7 more nigiri arrive and depart with the tempest gale of a one-night-only lover. Fish is shaped and slung so fast that soy sauce is spilled onto the floor and across all plates. I look up to see a chef replace his blowtorch’s butane cartridge with his left hand while molding a perfect rice pillow in his right.

I am terrified to piss. There is no time for that. I do it anyway. In the overheated bathroom I reflect: what is the common thread between the Norse Berserker and the American billionaire? In the deep winter, pinned to the longhouse by blizzard, the Vikings hibernate by eating grandly and drinking copiously. In the Amalfi summer, with sufficient wealth to do any thing in any place, the billionaires gather to eat grandly and drink copiously. This has been the height of human please for time immemorial. I recall the time my father was quoted in print. Fittingly, his only contribution to the public letters was a passing quote in a Florida food magazine interviewing guests at a newly opened Italian restaurant: “I don’t eat, I dine,” he reportedly said. Just look at how we have structured our days: man’s entire daily rhythm is informed by the rising of his sun and the cadence his mealtimes. The evolutionary biologists may disagree over whether we were built for things like monogamy and religion, but who can argue that we were built for a prolonged and lingered meal? Decadence itself is a slow, drooping word. Luxurious. Do you hear the syrup in its pronunciation? Shinn. East. These are sharp, canine-toothed words.

I return to find the final plate has been deposited in front of my empty seat. Shinn East does not wait for you.

In recalling this Salmon with Foie Gras and truffle I am tempted to the analogy of a single malt Yamazaki, 20-years aged in Bordeaux barrels, swigged to the back of the throat while sprinting to catch a subway.

The cool night air. We exit to that magical copper light which is exclusive to New York, forming when the sticky bronze sunset bounces off the parade of towering glass. There is no denying the white heat pleasure of what I have just experienced, but stripped from adornment and flourish, I feel as if I have just exited a brothel. Having converted my money directly into dopamine, with no pomp and circumstance to cleanse the vulgarity of my transaction, I am left with a sense of “Now what?” It is only 6:50 pm. Welcome to the night.