Two countries, one craft, different rules
Sushi is the only cuisine I know where the ranking systems in the two countries that matter are measuring genuinely different things, and where the best restaurant in the world might not appear in any guide at all.
In America, Michelin is the arbiter, and its coverage is patchy by design. It publishes guides for New York, California, Chicago, Washington, Texas, Florida, Colorado and a few others, and simply does not visit the rest. So a truly great counter in Las Vegas or Honolulu or Seattle is invisible to the system, not because it fell short but because no inspector was sent.
In Japan, Michelin exists but is not the domestic authority. Tabelog is. It is a user review platform with a weighted algorithm that Japanese diners take extremely seriously, and its annual Tabelog Award, which grants Bronze, Silver and Gold to a tiny number of restaurants nationwide, is arguably the harder thing to win. A score above 4.0 out of 5 is exceptional. Above 4.5 is close to unheard of.
In Japan the very best sushi counters have quietly opted out of being ranked at all, and it has not cost them a single reservation.
And then there is the third category, which is the most Japanese thing about the whole business: the restaurants that have removed themselves. Several of the greatest sushi-ya in Tokyo no longer accept reservations from the public, take bookings only through existing customers or hotel concierges, and were consequently dropped from the Michelin Guide for being inaccessible. They did not decline in quality. They declined to participate.
The ten best in the United States
1. Sushi Sho, New York
Three Michelin stars · Midtown East · Chef Keiji Nakazawa
The most significant thing to happen to sushi in America in a decade. In November 2025 Michelin elevated Sushi Sho to three stars, making it the first sushi restaurant in New York to hold that rank since Masa, and demoting Masa in the same announcement.
Nakazawa is the man widely credited with reviving forgotten Edomae techniques, the curing, marinating and fermenting that Tokyo sushi used before refrigeration made them optional. He built the original Sushi Sho in Tokyo, moved to Waikiki, and opened in New York in March 2024. Ten seats, two seatings a night. He also serves in a style closer to the old sushi shops than the modern silent procession: courses, conversation, and a supplementary okonomi section where you order what you actually want.
2. Masa, New York
Two Michelin stars · Time Warner Center · Chef Masa Takayama
For twenty years the most expensive restaurant in America and the only three-star sushi counter in the country, until the 2026 guide took a star back. It remains extraordinary, and the demotion is more interesting than damning: it signals that the American sushi field has finally got deep enough that being the most expensive is no longer the same as being the best.
A hinoki counter Takayama reportedly had hand-planed, no menu, no prices spoken aloud, and toro, uni and truffle deployed with a lavishness that is either the point or the problem depending on your temperament. Everyone serious should go once.
3. Sushi Noz, New York
Two Michelin stars · Upper East Side · Chef Nozomu Abe
The purist’s choice in New York, and for many people the best room of the three. Abe built an Edo-style space around a hinoki counter, with a charcoal-fired approach and an obsessive attention to the temperature of the rice, which is the thing amateurs never notice and professionals never stop talking about.
Where Masa is abundance, Noz is restraint and sequence. The main counter seats a handful of people, and there is a smaller room, The Ash, for a shorter and less expensive version.
4. Sushi Kaneyoshi, Los Angeles
Michelin star · Downtown · Edomae
Down a flight of stairs in the basement of an unremarkable downtown office building, behind a door with almost no signage, which is about as close to a Tokyo experience as America offers architecturally. Strict Edomae work, tiny counter, and a chef who does not perform.
Los Angeles now has more starred sushi counters than any other American city, and Kaneyoshi is the one the others measure themselves against.
5. Sushi Nakazawa, New York
Michelin star · West Village · Chef Daisuke Nakazawa
The restaurant that made omakase a mainstream American idea. Daisuke Nakazawa apprenticed under Jiro Ono and appeared in Jiro Dreams of Sushi as the young chef who made egg custard more than two hundred times before his master accepted one. That film did more to explain sushi to Americans than every guide combined, and this is the place it produced.
Twenty courses at the counter, warmer and more welcoming than most rooms at this level, and still the best introduction in the country for someone who has never done this before.
6. Shin Sushi, Los Angeles
Michelin star · Encino
Proof that the best sushi in Los Angeles is not in Beverly Hills. A strip-mall counter in the San Fernando Valley holding a Michelin star, which is the most Los Angeles sentence in this article. Tight, technical omakase with an unusually good relationship with its fish suppliers.
7. Sushi Yoshizumi, San Mateo
Michelin star · San Francisco Peninsula · Chef Akira Yoshizumi
A suburban storefront south of San Francisco running a rigorous Edomae programme with serious ageing and curing work. Yoshizumi trained in Tokyo and is meticulous to the point of severity about sourcing. The Bay Area has a complicated relationship with sushi guides, and this is the counter that everyone agrees on.
8. Mori Nozomi, Los Angeles
Michelin star · West Los Angeles
The successor to Mori Sushi, one of the foundational serious counters in California, now under Nozomi Mori. Notable for milling its own rice, which almost nobody outside Japan bothers to do, and for a house style that leans quiet and mineral rather than rich.
9. Nozawa Bar, Los Angeles
Michelin star · Beverly Hills
A ten-seat counter hidden behind a curtain at the back of a Sugarfish, which sounds like a joke and is not. Kazunori Nozawa is the chef who taught Los Angeles to eat sushi the way it is eaten in Tokyo, warm rice and all, and this is the fine-dining expression of that lineage.
10. Sushi Inaba, Los Angeles
Michelin star · Los Angeles
The newest of the LA counters on this list and the one on the steepest upward trajectory. Classical Edomae, small room, and an emphasis on the shari, the seasoned rice, that puts it in conversation with much older names.
The ones the guide cannot see
Michelin does not publish a Las Vegas or Hawaii guide, which means two of the most respected counters in America are structurally excluded. Kabuto in Las Vegas has been serving strict Edomae off the Strip for years at a fraction of New York prices and is regularly named the best value in American sushi. And the Honolulu sushi scene, seeded by Nakazawa’s years at Waikiki, is stronger than the guide will ever record. If you are ranking by what is on the rice rather than by which cities Michelin visits, both belong here.
The ten best in Japan
1. Harutaka, Tokyo
Three Michelin stars · Ginza · Chef Harutaka Takahashi
The three-star sushi restaurant in the current Michelin Guide Tokyo, and the one bookable name at the absolute summit. Takahashi trained under Jiro Ono, and his Edomae work is the classical Ginza style executed without a single wasted movement.
Omakase only, a counter you could count on two hands, and a rice seasoning built on red vinegar, which gives that darker, rounder, slightly sweet-sour foundation that separates the old Tokyo school from everything else.
2. Sushi Saito, Tokyo
Delisted from Michelin · Akasaka · Chef Takashi Saito
Widely considered by Japanese diners and by other sushi chefs to be the best in the country, and it holds no Michelin stars at all, because it stopped taking public reservations and was removed from the guide on the grounds that the reader could not get in.
Seven seats. Bookings essentially only through existing regulars or a handful of hotel concierges. Saito’s style is warm rice, generous seasoning and a sense of pace that other chefs describe as musical. It is the clearest illustration of the point that a guide measures accessibility as well as quality.
3. Sukiyabashi Jiro Honten, Tokyo
Delisted from Michelin · Ginza · Chef Jiro Ono
The most famous sushi restaurant on earth, and for the same reason as Saito, not in the guide. It held three stars for over a decade before being removed in 2020 when it became effectively impossible for the public to book.
Ono, born in 1925, is the subject of Jiro Dreams of Sushi and the person who made the word shokunin, the artisan devoted to a single craft, legible to the rest of the world. Twenty pieces in about thirty minutes, no appetisers, no conversation to speak of. The Roppongi branch, run by his second son, does hold two Michelin stars and is the realistic way in.
4. Sushi Kanesaka, Tokyo
Two Michelin stars · Ginza · Chef Shinji Kanesaka
The most aesthetically considered room in Ginza sushi, down to five-hundred-year-old vases used for the flower arrangements. Kanesaka is also the most internationally minded of the great Tokyo chefs, with outposts abroad, and his counter is one of the few at this level that reliably accommodates foreign guests, usually through a hotel concierge.
5. Nishiazabu Sushi Shin, Tokyo
Two Michelin stars · Nishiazabu · Chef Shintaro Suzuki
Two stars, and the counter most often described as the warmest at the top tier. Suzuki sources fanatically from across Japan and is known for hospitality that is genuinely welcoming rather than merely correct, which at this altitude is rarer than good fish.
6. Sushi Shimazu, Tokyo
Tabelog Award Gold 2026 · score 4.54
One of the highest Tabelog scores in the entire country, in any category, and newly promoted to Gold in the 2026 awards. A 4.54 is extraordinary. To put it in context, most restaurants Japanese diners consider excellent sit around 3.6, and the platform’s scoring is deliberately harsh.
This is the entry that would never appear on a list assembled from Western sources, and it is exactly why the Tabelog data is worth reading.
7. Komada, Mie Prefecture
Tabelog Award Gold 2026 · score 4.54
Not in Tokyo at all. Mie, on the Pacific coast south of Nagoya, best known to the outside world for Ise-Shima and pearl diving. Komada took Gold in the 2026 Tabelog Awards with a score matching the very best in the capital.
Japan’s regional sushi is systematically underrated by foreign visitors, who arrive, eat in Ginza and leave. The coastal prefectures have the fish first.
8. Sushi Mitani, Tokyo
Tabelog Award Gold 2026 · score 4.51
Promoted from Silver to Gold in 2026, which in the Tabelog system is a considerable event. A small, low-profile counter with almost no international presence and a domestic reputation that is close to reverent.
9. Sushi Ikkou, Tokyo
Tabelog Award Gold 2026 · score 4.24
Re-entered the Gold tier in the 2026 awards. Worth including because it demonstrates something about the Japanese system that the Michelin star does not capture: restaurants move up and down these rankings year by year on consistency, not on a single inspection.
10. Sushi Hashimoto, Tokyo
Michelin star · Shintomicho
A short walk from Ginza and a considerable distance from its prices. Classical Edomae from a chef trained in the old school, in a room with no theatre in it. This is the answer to the question every visitor eventually asks, which is whether you have to spend the equivalent of a flight to eat sushi properly in Tokyo. You do not.
How to actually get a seat
In America, book online the day reservations drop, usually thirty days out at midnight, and set an alarm. The three-star and two-star New York rooms go in minutes. Solo diners get seats that pairs cannot, so if you are willing to go alone you will eat better and sooner.
In Japan, understand that many of the best counters practise ichigensan okotowari, no first-time customers without an introduction. This is not snobbery, it is a system built on the assumption that a small counter runs on knowing its guests. The two routes in are a concierge at a serious hotel, who will have relationships and will spend them on you if you are staying there, or a Japanese friend or colleague willing to introduce you. Book through the hotel before you fly, not after you land.
At the counter, eat the piece immediately, within seconds, because the rice is at body temperature and falling. Use your fingers, which is correct and always has been. Do not add soy sauce, the chef has already seasoned it. Do not add wasabi, it is already inside. Never mix wasabi into the soy dish, which is the single most reliable way to identify a tourist in Tokyo. Eat the ginger between pieces and not with them.
And do not ask for a California roll. Not because anybody will be rude to you, but because you will have flown a very long way to order the one thing they did not want to make.
The best meal I have had at a sushi counter cost a third of the most expensive one. That is worth remembering before you start reading price lists as though they were scores.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.
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