Chef Masahiro Kan began his culinary career by cooking Thai curries before he transitioned to making sushi a few years ago. He primarily served traditional Edomae-style sushi to his diners, until one of his patrons made a joke about mixing sushi with Thai food. Kan ran with this idea, and decided to offer Thai-inspired sushi at his Kanagawa restaurant for a limited time. What began as a gimmick proved to be surprisingly popular, leading Kan to fully delve into a menu that encompassed his international culinary background.
Kan closed his Kanagawa restaurant last September but is now back with a new sushi shop in the Toranomon Hills Station Tower, where Thai-inspired sushi is a mainstay. For lunch, he offers 'Ethnic Chirashi Sushi' for ¥1,650 – a dish of fresh seafood marinated in fish sauce and lime over rice, complemented by eggs seasoned with fish sauce and mirin.
Dinner, available exclusively by reservation, features a comprehensive omakase sushi course for ¥23,000, where Kan delights in surprising his guests with unconventional combinations. Looking around, you’ll see Sugahisa features all the trademarks of a traditional Edomae sushi restaurant, with natural wooden countertops surrounding its small open kitchen and dainty sake cups lined along its shelves, but the smells emanating from Kan's simmering pots on the countertops are reminiscent of lively food stalls of Thailand, with punchy notes of lemon grass, bird's eye chili and shrimp paste and lime leaves.
This theme is present in every item of Sugahisa’s tasting menu, which includes roughly four appetisers, 12 nigiri pieces and a soup dish. A small pot of chawanmushi (savoury egg custard) which is typically eggshell white in colour, is given a green hue here, where the zesty heat of green curry paste is mellowed out with creamy melt-in-your-mouth morsels of shirako (cod milt). What looks like a normal piece of maguro nigiri is glazed with a cumin-spiced sauce instead of traditional shoyu and even the palate-cleansing pickled ginger is reinvented as a distant cousin of crunchy papaya salad.
If you’ve come to Tokyo in search of the most authentic Edomae-style sushi the city has to offer, then Sugahisa probably isn’t the first place to look, but sushi fanatics who also adore the characterful flavours of Thai cuisine (most of us, really) will find few better places to spend their money.