‘I Leave it up to You’

Trust the culinary process flow at Sushi Katsuei

Park Slope’s third street is beautifully incongruent. A double-wide thoroughfare, the street is lined by tall trees and some of Brooklyn’s oldest architecture. It ranks among the neighborhoods most picturesque walking streets, and yet it has neither the directional utility, nor the commercial purpose of busier streets like ninth.

A friend once told me that third avenue was built this way to fit the carriages of Park Slopes founding one-percenter, Edwin Litchfeild. This writer confesses he has not fact-checked that piece of local lore, but please feel free to pass it along to your out-of-town relatives the next time they visit.

And while you are parading your guests up third street, on a crisp Fall evening, professing the virtues of orange tree canopies and stately townhouses clad in Triassic sandstone, consider the building on the northwest corner of third and seventh where Brooklyn hides grand architecture of the culinary variety.

On the ground floor of this unassuming building, night after night, Brooklyn’s skilled sushi chefs sculpt and serve the best sushi in the borough. Sushi Katsuei is not ostentatious. It has none of the interior decadence or scale of its better-known Manhattan cousins. The interior is modest, clean and intimate. At first glance it might not strike your out-of-town guests as a gourmet eating establishment. But you should assure them to put a little trust in those men behind the counter. 

The Japanese word for a trained sushi chef is “Itamae” and it literally translates to “In front of the board”. They perform their art with such competence and skill, that they invite customers to watch them work.

Katsuei specializes in Edo-style Sushi, served to patrons in the Japanese tradition of Omakase. The format is a Chef’s choice tasting menu which literally translates as “I leave it up to you”. You walk into Katsuei, put your trust in their professional staff, and for that trust you will be rewarded. 

I realize it is a bold claim to say that they have the best sushi in the borough. Brooklyn has become a gastronomic jewel in its own right, and there is certainly no shortage of competent sushi restaurants serving high quality fish. 

My argument for why Sushi Katsuei deserves the title stems not only from the quality of their fish, but also from the manner of their service. It is true that when Katsuei’s Itamae serves you a single piece of Otoro, you will experience fatty tuna belly in its optimal platonic configuration. It will melt in your mouth, and it will ruin the average tuna for you forever. Still, there are more things to consider than simply taste.

At Katsuei you can be assured you are not only enjoying the highest quality ingredients, but that you are enjoying them in the optimal sequence, and with every ounce of value funneled into their preparation and presentation. Katsuei offers Omakase at an affordable price (relative to its peers) without sacrificing anything from the core experience. And now you begin to understand why they serve the best sushi in Brooklyn, because they offer what so few restaurants on Earth can: perfected cuisine, authentically experienced, at an attainable price. Nobu, for the rest of us.

The restaurant’s sushi bar is small, and if you want a seat there you will have to call ahead, but you don’t need to secure one of those coveted seats to enjoy their Omakase. Katsuei offers a variation to guests seated at tables, wherein their warm and intelligent wait staff carry out several pieces of fish at a time, and politely instruct patrons on the correct order to consume them. This configuration, though somewhat less traditional, lends itself wonderfully to intimate family gatherings, and is optimal for impressing your out-of-town relatives.

Like the prices, and the clean modest atmosphere, this adaptation further allows Katsuei to carry out its mission, while sacrificing no element of its art. The wait staff will happily transmit your giddy praise for each dish along to your Chef.

All the crowd favorites are present, and obviously perfect; uni, snapper, the best cuts of the tuna in three sublime acts, the perfectly prepared yellowtail, lightly seasoned with a few drops of citrus and a sprinkle of green onion. But it is the unexpected act that sets them apart; a succulent sweet shrimp that expands your concept of what sushi can be, or a cut of Mackerel, clean and bright like you did not know was possible. If you give them a chance, interrupt your evening stroll in the cool Fall air, the staff at Katsuei will introduce you to another dimension of this neighborhood’s intimate inner beauty.

Like the tree lined thoroughfare it sits beside, Sushi Katsuei was built to suit its own purpose; to invite the people that pass through it to experience Omakase in its purest joyful form. They are here to offer an accessible and broad avenue of entry to a bright Japanese culinary tradition. All you need to do is come inside, put your name down, and put your trust in them.