Sushi connoisseurs judge their restaurants in all sorts of finicky, hypersensitive ways. They focus obsessively on the quality of the rice (soft is good, too soft is bad), or the texture of the tamago egg sushi (too sweet is very bad), or even the color of the gari ginger (pink gari is the kiss of death). For the non-connoisseur, however, the simplest way to judge the popularity, and even the quality, of a topflight sushi restaurant in the city is by the number of serious-faced gentlemen in neatly pressed shirts twiddling their smartphones at the bar. Forget about Kobe beef and the $120 prime rib for two. For the new, postmillennial generation of financial titans and Internet billionaires, raw fish is the ultimate trophy food. It won’t give you a heart attack. It’s loaded with subtle snob appeal. If cash is no object, as the high-roller habitués of restaurants like Masa in the Time Warner Center and Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo will tell you, there’s no more theatrical, cosmopolitan meal in the world.
Like their beef-loving forebears, members of the sushi power elite tend to travel in packs and dine in the same rotation of trusted, ridiculously expensive establishments again and again. But lately I’ve noticed more and more of them congregating at an unassuming sushi restaurant called Neta, which opened last month among the scruffy bars and cut-rate West Village shoe stores along 8th Street near Sixth Avenue. In the tradition of discreetly ambitious sushiyas everywhere, the façade of the storefront space is painted in black trim and covered in pale curtains. There are a few tables set along the walls inside, but most of the narrow, railroad-car-size space is taken up by the bar, which is made of polished ebony. Aside from a random vase of cherry blossoms in the corner, the gray-shaded room is so devoid of artifice and decoration that one of my guests compared it to a “corporate test kitchen” in the suburbs of New Jersey.
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