Some might consider herbs and sushi odd bedfellows.  

But yet that’s exactly what the Michelin-starred Udatsu Sushi specializes in. At the outset of his career, owner-chef Udatsu Hisashi had never believed in cooking with herbs, believing them too fragrant and floral for his tastes.  

A single visit to Kajiya Farm in Hiroshima — a farm specializing in pesticide-free herbs — changed that. There, Chef Udatsu was offered a dish of fish prepared with herbs, and the experience unlocked a rush of culinary possibilities in his mind. “I didn’t think that herbs were ‘smelly’ after that,” he recalls. “It was from there that I started thinking about serving seasonal fish with herbs.”  

Thus was his signature dish born: the “herb maki”, a beautifully crafted sushi roll of seaweed, fish and herbs, often with a single sprig of flowers sprouting gracefully from the center. True to its conceptualization as a seasonal dish, the precise combination of fish and herbs varies with the seasons, the former personally chosen every morning from his network of suppliers from Toyosu Market.   

This attention to detail extends far beyond the fish. The restaurant’s kinuhikari rice, for instance, is sourced from producers in Tokyo, directly contracted to make rice for the restaurant. Even after harvesting, the rice is specially kept at a carefully controlled humidity and temperature. It’s then treated with a special vinegar — a blend made from three types of rice — from Kyoto’s famed Iio Jozo vinegar brewery. Wrapped in Asakusa seaweed from Kagoshima Prefecture, the sushi is then dipped in the restaurant’s special blend of soy sauce that incorporates aged mirin, sake and three separate types of soy sauce from Tokyo’s Kondo, Wakayama’s Horikawa Nomura and Itoshima’s Mitsuru breweries.  

Each individual component of the sushi is so carefully crafted, they are almost works of art in themselves. As such, it serves as no surprise that the central theme behind Udatsu Sushi is “art x sushi”: a sushi restaurant inside an art gallery.   

And if not for the beautiful sushi placed on the counter before its guests, this Nakameguro restaurant could almost be mistaken for a contemporary art gallery. It takes many of its design cues from them, such as bare concrete walls and a simple, unadorned Yoshino cypress counter that allows the tableware to stand out even more. “Sushi is a work of art created by the chef,” says Chef Udatsu, driving the point home by even using different plates for summer and winter.