There are no photographs with this review, and there will not be any. Masa does not allow them. The restaurant’s own booking page puts it plainly: “photography and videography are strictly prohibited”. It gives two reasons, preserving the environment of the room, and the privacy of the people in it. Phones stay on silent. Calls are taken outside. Guests who ignore it, the same page says, may be asked to leave. Every other review on this site is built on my own pictures. This one is built on paying attention instead.

I have come to think that is the most interesting thing about the room, and not a limitation on writing about it.

Where it is, which is the first surprise

Masa is on the fourth floor of a shopping mall. That is not a slight; it is the Deutsche Bank Center at 10 Columbus Circle, and the same building holds a great deal of expensive retail, but you do arrive by escalator, past luggage and cosmetics, and it never stops being funny. Then a door, and the noise of Columbus Circle simply stops.

The room seats twenty-six. The counter is a single slab of hinoki cypress, flown from Japan, and it is the object the whole restaurant is arranged around. It is unlacquered and unsealed, scrubbed rather than polished, and it has the pale, matte, slightly soft look of wood that is maintained daily rather than protected.

Takayama did not start here. He cooked in Los Angeles for years before New York, and the restaurant that made his name in Tokyo, Ginza Sushi-ko under Suhiyama Toshiaki, is the kind of apprenticeship that shows up as restraint rather than technique. There are two other Masa rooms in this city, a bar and a kappo, and both are easier in every sense. This is the strict one.

The counter or the table, and why it matters

There are two ways to eat here and they are sold separately. The Hinoki Counter Experience puts you at the cypress, in front of the chefs. Table seating puts you in the dining room, where the same food arrives but the making of it does not. There is also a lunch service at the counter.

Take the counter. The entire proposition of this restaurant is watching one man and his cooks work in near silence at arm’s length, and taking the same dinner at a table and having it carried to you is the single worst decision available on the booking page.

What comes out

There is no menu. You are not asked what you would like and there is nothing to read. Masayoshi Takayama trained under Suhiyama Toshiaki at Ginza Sushi-ko in Tokyo, and what he learned there is visible in the shape of the meal rather than in any single dish: it opens with cooked things, moves through the raw, and ends without ceremony.

Most of the fish is flown from Japan. The house signatures recur: toro with osetra, nigiri built on foie gras, abalone handled in a way I have not seen elsewhere in the city, and in season a quantity of white and black truffle shaved over things that were already rich before it arrived. That last part is where the room divides people, and I will come back to it.

The rice is warmer than you expect and looser than you expect. It is seasoned assertively enough that a couple of the leaner pieces come across as sharp rather than delicate. Nothing is sauced to hide behind.

The abalone is the thing I would come back for, and it is the hardest to describe without a picture, which is a sentence this restaurant has arranged for me to have to write. It arrives worked to a texture that is not chewy and not soft, somewhere closer to the resistance of a mushroom stem, and it tastes overwhelmingly of the sea in a way none of the raw fish does. It is a cooked dish in a room people come to for raw fish, and it is better than most of the raw fish.

The counter itself is worth arriving early enough to look at properly. It is scrubbed down rather than wiped between guests, and the wood has the faint unevenness of a surface that gets abraded daily. Nothing is set on it that does not need to be. There are no cloths, no cruets, no card with the name of the restaurant on it.

There is no menu, no music, and nothing to photograph. What is left is the food and the sound of the room, which is mostly knives.

The silence, and what the policy is actually for

The no-phone rule reads, on the booking page, like the sort of thing a restaurant writes to sound serious. In the room it is not that at all. Twenty-six people, no music, nobody holding a screen up: the loudest sound is a knife going through fish, and a room full of people who have run out of ways to perform has to actually talk to each other.

The stated reason is guest privacy, and given who eats in that building, that is plainly a real consideration. But the effect is on the food. You look at a piece of nigiri for the two seconds before you eat it rather than the forty seconds it takes to light it properly, and it turns out two seconds is the correct amount of time.

The other thing the silence does is expose the service. With nothing to look at on a screen you notice how the room is run, and it is run extremely tightly: plates land without being announced, glasses are dealt with before you have registered wanting anything, and nobody explains a dish at length. The explanation is one sentence, sometimes just the name of the fish and where it came from, and then they leave you alone with it. After two hours of that, the ordinary restaurant habit of a server narrating a plate for thirty seconds starts to seem like an odd thing that people do.

It is also, and this is worth saying plainly, not a warm room. Nobody is unfriendly and several of the cooks are quietly funny once you have been sitting there a while, but the register is formal and it does not loosen much. If your idea of a great night out involves the chef pouring you something off-menu at the end and telling you a story, this is not that restaurant, and it is not trying to be.

The counter-argument

Two, and they are both real.

The first is the truffle. In season it goes over a great deal, and there is a point in the evening, usually somewhere after the third shaving, where luxury stops being a seasoning and becomes the argument itself. Some of the best things served here are the plainest, and they are the ones the truffle lands on top of. If that reads as generosity to you, it is. If it reads as a restaurant reaching for the grandest thing in the building, that is also fair, and it is the most common serious complaint about Masa.

The second is the mall. You will pay a great deal of attention for two or three hours and then walk out into a shopping centre. There is no transition, no bar to sit in afterwards, nowhere for the evening to come down. Book somewhere for a drink before you go in, not after.

What is not a fair complaint: the second star. Masa held three for about fifteen years and was moved to two in November 2025, and the reaction was noisier than the change deserved. Two stars at Masa describes the same room, the same counter and the same cooking it described a year ago.

Know before you go

Book through Tock, and book the counter. Parties of one are welcome at it, which is rarer than it should be at this level and is the best possible way to eat here.

Tell them about allergies and dietary restrictions when you book. The restaurant accommodates them, with stated exceptions, but not on the night.

Leave your phone in your pocket and your fragrance at home. Both are asked for, and the second matters more than it sounds in a room where a lot of what you are being sold arrives by smell.

And do not expect to leave with anything. That is the deal here, and after an evening of it I think the restaurant has the better of the argument.

The only restaurant I have been to where the rule against photographs improves the food. Sit at the counter.