Atlanta’s celebrity dining magnet is heading to Manhattan: Umi, the long-running Japanese restaurant from Farshid Arshid and Charlie Hendon, will open in June at 63 Madison Avenue near East 27th Street, bringing a sceney dining room paired with a dedicated omakase counter from a team rooted in Southern hospitality.
New Yorkers will know the new chef of Umi, Kazuo Yoshida, a Nagasaki native, from previous stints at Juku in Chinatown, 1 or 8 in Brooklyn, and Jewel Bako in the East Village.
The 5,000-square-foot restaurant lands in the Flatiron-Nomad corridor not far from Eleven Madison Park, designed by French design firm Gilles & Boissier (behind the Baccarat Hotel in New York).
Uni risotto at Umi. Lara Kastner
In some ways, the model echoes places like Philadelphia’s Double Knot, or the enduring appeal of Blue Ribbon Sushi : restaurants where diners can move between sushi and kitchen cooking. Umi is positioning itself at a more polished, high-end tier — a fancy restaurant in a gilded corridor, with a statement dining room, and a tightly run sushi counter rather than a casual sushi-plus-izakaya setup.
The Atlanta-based partners say they felt there was room in the market, with New York’s sushi scene tilted toward ultra-expensive omakase counters, Hendon says.
New York’s omakase scene has become stratospheric, “where dinner started at $125, then $175, then $250 … now it’s $750 plus add-ons,” Hendon tells Eater. Umi’s answer is to offer both experiences.
The kitchen menu builds on dishes that have defined Umi’s twelve years in Atlanta, including lobster toban-yaki, wagyu steak, and uni risotto — part of what Hendon describes as an evolution of the Japanese fusion playbook popularized by restaurants like Nobu. It’s also paralleling some of the experience it offers in Atlanta, a city obsessed with omakase, a genre that landed four of the city’s nine Michelin stars.
Lobster toban-yaki at Umi. Lara Kastner
The drinks selection will also expand in New York, where sake distribution is more broad than in Georgia, giving the restaurant access to labels they say they simply can’t get in Atlanta.
Arshid says he started scouting the New York neighborhood four years ago, convinced the city’s restaurant center of gravity was shifting toward the Flatiron-Nomad corridor, citing Cote and Cosme not far away.
The goal, he says, isn’t to create another impossible reservation.“Dining should not be like that,” he says. “You should be able to go out and dine at the best place the way you want, when you want.”
In a city where the impossible reservation has become a frothy obsession, good luck with that.