With reporting by Melissa McCart

Hi Dozo, the delivery-only sushi restaurant from chef Daisuke Nakazawa of Sushi Nakazawa is expanding to New York City. The service, which launched in Los Angeles in May 2024 and now operates out of a handful of ghost kitchens there, is planning its first brick-and-mortar location in Midtown. The new yet-to-be-announced location near Rockefeller Center is expected to open in approximately eight months.

“It’s true: We are coming to New York,” says Alessandro Borgognone, founder of Nakazawa and Hi Dozo (styled Hi.Dozo).”We wanted to get a showcase location with a sophisticated feel where you can sit down for lunch or dinner as well as takeout.” At the new restaurnat, diners can get the brand’s signature box, as well as a limited selection of drinks. “We don’t fool around,” he says. “We use the same products as we do at Nakazawa.”

In addition to signing a lease for a brick-and-mortar location in West Hollywood (the first beyond ghost kitchens in LA), the plan is for Hi Dozo to expand to Washington, D.C., Dallas, and Houston.

Nakazawa is a protege of Jiro Ono and the chef behind the West Village counter that earned four stars from New York Times critic Pete Wells, in 2013. He developed Hi Dozo as a way to extend his reach beyond the $190-plus omakase.

Hi Dozo is a partnership with DoorDash and operates exclusively through the platform, offering nigiri sets, sashimi, and rolls packaged in color-coded, modular to-go boxes. Sets range from $29 to $54, featuring six, eight, or 12 pieces of nigiri, accompanied by edamame, futomaki, sashimi, wasabi, ginger, and Nakazawa’s soy sauce blend. A DIY hand roll kit — toro, yellowtail, salmon, ikura, rice, and nori — runs $29.

The name translates roughly to “Hi. Here you go,” an informality that’s a contrast to the original omakase restaurant.

The New York expansion marks a homecoming of sorts. Sushi Nakazawa opened its original location on Commerce Street in the West Village in 2013 and became one of the most coveted reservations in the city. The restaurant holds a Michelin star; a second location in D.C. opened at what was then the Trump International Hotel in 2018, a building since converted into a Waldorf Astoria. Hi Dozo’s NYC restaurant, by contrast, is meant to operate as a production hub rather than a destination counter, enabling widespread delivery while keeping the Nakazawa name.

The timing of the New York expansion is not incidental. DoorDash has been aggressively repositioning itself from a delivery platform into something closer to a full dining ecosystem — and Hi Dozo fits within that strategy.

In September, DoorDash launched a reservations feature called Going Out, which allows users to book tables and earn dining-related credits through the app. The move followed the company’s $1.2 billion acquisition of SevenRooms, the restaurant management platform that powers table management, VIP tracking, and guest data for some of New York’s most competitive dining rooms. Through that deal, DoorDash bought the infrastructure that restaurants use to manage their most valuable customers. As Eater New York reported in January, the combination creates something new: For the first time, a single company can potentially connect delivery orders, in-person reservations, and dine-out rewards into a unified customer profile, giving both restaurants and DoorDash an unusually complete picture of how and where you eat.

DoorDash and Resy have been reshaping how some restaurants allocate their best tables. A small number of New York restaurants — among them, Thai Diner and Sushi Noz — are now offering reservations exclusively through DoorDash. DashPass subscribers, who pay roughly $10 a month for free delivery and related perks, get access to some of that exclusive inventory as part of their membership. The company is also running reservation-only dining events in New York, with more planned.