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Masa
Masa opened in 2004 inside New York's Time Warner Center (now the Deutsche Bank Center), founded by chef Masa Takayama, and it quickly became known as one of the most expensive restaurants in the entire United States, with tasting-menu prices that have run into the hundreds of dollars per person for years, driven substantially by the restaurant's insistence on flying in fish directly from Japan's Tsukiji (now Toyosu) fish market. The restaurant earned three Michelin stars and has maintained that rating for years running, one of the longest-held three-star ratings of any restaurant in New York City, reflecting a level of consistency in execution that Michelin inspectors have recognized across repeated visits over more than a decade. Masa's dining room is built around a hinoki cypress wood counter imported directly from Japan, and the restaurant seats only a small number of diners per service, a deliberately intimate format that keeps the chef's personal attention on every single plate served during a given seating rather than delegating to a larger kitchen brigade. Masa's combination of its sustained three-Michelin-star rating, its direct-from-Tsukiji fish sourcing, and its position as one of the most expensive restaurants in the country has made it the reference point for high-end omakase dining in the United States specifically, the American answer to Tokyo's most legendary sushi counters.
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Kura Sushi
Kura Sushi originated in Japan in 1977 and expanded into the United States beginning in 2008, built around a "kaiten," or conveyor-belt, sushi format in which small plates continuously circulate past diners seated at a counter or table, letting customers simply grab whatever looks appealing as it passes by. The American chain added technology-driven features specifically aimed at younger diners and families, including a "Bikkura Pon" capsule-toy game that dispenses a small prize after every fifteen plates a table finishes, a genuinely playful gamification element that's helped distinguish Kura from more purely utilitarian conveyor-belt competitors. Kura Sushi USA went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2019, becoming one of the few sushi restaurant chains in the country to trade as a publicly listed company, and it's continued expanding rapidly across the US in the years since, bringing a genuinely high-volume, technology-forward sushi format to markets that previously had little access to conveyor-belt sushi at all. Kura Sushi's combination of its conveyor-belt format, its playful capsule-toy incentive system, and its status as a publicly traded restaurant chain has made it one of the most commercially significant and rapidly expanding sushi chains in the entire country, bringing a genuinely different, high-volume dining format to a category otherwise dominated by high-end omakase counters.
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