Warm Hands

Sushi Meino, Tokyo

Mei Kogo cuts with force, nothing tentative about it, yet everything lands softly. Between pieces she looks up, answers, laughs. None of that sepulchral silence that makes some high-end counters feel like an exam you didn’t study for.

The shop is in Azabu Juban, open since November 2023 and already one of the hardest reservations in Tokyo. Mei earned it the long way: about a decade through some of the city’s most respected kitchens, then second chef at Sushi Arai, one of the defining Edomae counters of this generation, where she ran the private room for two years before going out on her own.

Mei-san at work

I am a novice in this world, and a few lucky meals at coveted counters prove nothing, so take this as impression rather than verdict. Her sushi is precise and light, the pieces smaller than at most counters of this caliber, built for clarity over impact. The ika was scored so fine it went soft, releasing its natural sweetness, lifted by a touch of lemon. Delicate, elegant, feminine if you want that word, though I suspect the truer one is simply hers.

The sourcing reads like a self-portrait too. The uni comes from Fukuoka, where she grew up. To me, it tasted sweeter and rounder than its famous Hokkaido cousins, and I didn’t ask whether sentiment gets a vote. The sardine comes from a single Noto fisherman she insists on working with, the kind of one-boat loyalty that rarely makes it onto a menu.

It was somewhere around the akagai that I stopped watching the fish and started watching the room. The two chefs flanking Mei at their own prep. The young woman in service whites. Every person working at Sushi Meino is a woman. I only noticed it then, halfway through lunch. No speech, no mission statement on the menu. The trade has carried the same folklore for generations: that women’s hands run too warm for raw fish (the studies say the opposite), that the menstrual cycle throws off the palate. Versions of it were still coming from some of the craft’s biggest names into the 2010s. Women are still, by most estimates, fewer than one in ten sushi chefs in Japan. Let alone at this level.

At Meino nobody brings any of it up. The room simply exists and works.

If one piece stuck, it was the anago. Sea eel barely holding its shape, blistered from the grill, painted with nitsume, gone in one bite. She lifted the lid of the box it came in and walked us through it.

A guest offered a round, and she accepted, her assistants too, glasses raised across the counter.