The salmon arrives whole. Atsuomi Hotta sets the 13-pound fish, still stiff from the cold, on the cutting board and sands away the scales. He is careful as he begins to carve, aware that if he’s too rough, he could bruise the meat he’ll be serving that evening.
Paper towels come out to wick away the moisture. The water carries a certain fishiness with it, Hotta explains, and if you’re patient enough to draw it out, the meat will taste better for it.
Hotta usually begins his days around 1 p.m., sometimes earlier. He works alongside his partner, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, preparing the fish, which is mostly sourced from Japan. Dinner service begins at 5:30 p.m. at Uotora, a small neighborhood sushiya in the middle of Crown Heights.
They’ve done this ritual of sorts together for nearly eight years now. But soon, they’ll stop. Uotora will host its final diners on March 31.
There are several reasons, which Hotta lays out plainly.
Business got a bit slower after the pandemic; some neighborhood regulars had moved away. Kobayashi is easing toward retirement. And Hotta’s father died, so he needs to go back home to Nagoya, Japan, for a while, to handle things, see family and take a moment to breathe – things that running a restaurant doesn’t leave much time for.
Is he sad to close? Relieved?
“Ahhhh,” he says, as he trims away pieces of the salmon's neck, “both.”
Things are what they are.
Uotora was never loud about what it was. Just two itamae behind a counter in Crown Heights, making some of the best sushi in Brooklyn, mostly for people who live nearby.
Uotora closes Tuesday after nearly eight years in operation.
Uotora looks different at night, once the sun has set. It’s warm inside in nearly every way. The blond wood interior is lit with low orange lights. Jazz plays so softly you can barely hear it over the guests’ conversations and laughter. The small space holds just six tables and eight seats at the sushi bar.
Last Wednesday, every seat was taken. Word had gotten out that Uotora was closing and the neighborhood was paying its respects. Hotta said Uotora had been serving 30 to 40 people a night, roughly twice what the restaurant normally does.
Hotta and Kobayashi specialize in omakase, a chef’s choice approach to sushi, which unfolds over several courses and two or more hours. At the bar, it’s the only option on the menu, with a price of $105.
The meal begins with sashimi — bonito, fluke or salmon — set alongside a tumbleweed of radish. Each piece is so thinly sliced that you can see through it when you hold it up to the light. Those cuts are followed by appetizers: zucchini paired with pecan or a small flower-shaped bowl of snow crab, vinegar, seaweed and half a kumquat. And then comes the sushi, fresh cuts of kanpache (amber jack), crimson chutoro (tuna), kinmedai (golden-eyed snapper) and other daily selections, delivered piece by piece over rice to the waiting diners. Finally, a handroll and some miso soup with delicately cut ribbons of tofu floating on top.
The chefs perform their work behind the bar, boxes of fish, pink and crimson and orange, laid out before them. The operation has the rhythm of a factory, intentional and precise, but what the chefs send out looks more like art or sculpture. Even the wasabi and ginger are shaped and placed just so.
The chefs chat with customers as they go, and that night they sipped sake — one customer said he’d never seen them do that before — but mostly they focused on the task before them, working quickly, but never rushing.
Mitch Polo was at the bar. What number visit this was, he couldn’t be sure. He owns Nostrand Avenue Pub, about a block away, and has been coming to Uotora since the first night it opened.
The omakase is always very good, he said, but tonight, the chefs were “batting 1,000.”
It’s hard to say what the whole neighborhood is losing when a business like that goes out. We’re certainly losing something that’s unique in the neighborhood.
It’s hard to say, exactly, what this neighborhood will lose when Uotora closes its doors.
Hotta had no answer of his own. “I’m not sure,” he said and left it at that.
Some regulars offered their own ideas.
Suyoung Yang has been coming to Uotora for special occasions since before the pandemic.
“What I was really drawn to was the vibe, the intimacy,” she said. “They serve really great quality sushi, but it doesn’t feel flashy or anything.”
As soon as she heard the place was closing, she booked a reservation for her sister’s birthday. On their last night there, they sat at the bar for omakase and finished the night with sweet potato cheesecake.
“It sort of stands alone in that regard,” she said. “There’s nowhere else to get that meal.”
Polo, the bar owner, opened his place five years before Uotora moved in. He’s watched the neighborhood change, piece by piece.
“It’s hard to say what the whole neighborhood is losing when a business like that goes out,” he said. “We’re certainly losing something that’s unique in the neighborhood.”
He thought about it some more. “What’s the whole neighborhood losing? We’re losing a good sushi spot.”
The Sushi Legend, the author of an online sushi guide and review with tens of thousands of social media followers, reviewed Uotora in May 2018, not long after it first opened.
“The restaurant may appear simple from the outside, but Uotora is no simple sushiya,” wrote the Sushi Legend, who keeps their real name private to avoid recognition at restaurants. “Food is meticulously prepared and delivered, despite the fact that the undermanned roster of employees would easily fit inside a minivan.”
More recently, The Sushi Legend has written about the proliferation of what they call “Chalkboard Omakase,” a sort of pale imitation of what Hotta and Kobayashi do, characterized by gold flakes, blow torches, foie gras and menus that rarely change.
The Sushi Legend hadn’t heard about Uotora’s closing until Gothamist reached out.
“Sh--ty to hear. Great place,” they wrote to Gothamist. “The New York City sushi scene is a mile wide and an inch deep, and I worry about the slow death of the neighborhood sushiya.”
Hiroyuki Kobayashi during dinner service at Uotora.
Uotora’s location, on Bergen Street, just off Nostrand Avenue, was always a little bit risky, so far removed from the sorts of customers who casually spend hundreds of dollars on a single meal. Though to be fair, Uotora never charged that sort of money; the omakase was $70 when the place first opened.
But Hotta, who lived just a couple subway stops away, thought the neighborhood needed something like Uotora. After 20 years of working in the city’s sushi restaurants, he decided it was time to do his own thing. Kobayashi, with whom Hotta had worked in those restaurants, was the perfect partner.
“When we found this place, we thought it's a great space for sushi,” Hotta said. “It's pretty small and it’s a pretty quiet, cozy neighborhood.”
They have help in the kitchen, and Hotta’s wife handles the books and other back-of-house business, but each dinner service really comes down to the men behind the counter. Between cleaning and cutting the fish in the afternoon and serving it to diners at night, there’s never much time to rest, Hotta said.
Whether any of this gets rebuilt somewhere else is unclear. “I hope I can do that again,” Hotta said. “I need a good team. A big team.”
For now, he’s just focusing on finishing his last week before tending to things back in Japan.
By 11 p.m. on Wednesday, most of the tables had cleared out of the restaurant. The sushi bar, however, was still full. By that point, everybody was chatting with one another about the meal, the fish, and Japanese ramen.
Polo excused himself and ran across the street. After a few minutes, he returned with a bottle of Lagavulin 16, a single malt Scotch. He knew Kobayashi was a fan of single malts. Polo poured enough glasses for everyone there: the diners, the servers, the itamae.
Once everybody had one, there was a toast.
“Thank you,” everyone said. “Goodbye.”
Before Polo left that night, he booked one final reservation.
