Story
— The Chef
Chef Mori was born in Osaka in 1979, the son of a tofu maker. He began his kitchen career at seventeen, washing dishes in a kappo restaurant in Namba, then moved to Kyoto at twenty to apprentice under Shigeki Tanabe — one of the country’s most exacting kaiseki masters.
He spent seven years with Tanabe-san, learning that a dish was not finished until it was invisible — until the technique dissolved and only the ingredient remained. “If the customer notices the cooking,” Tanabe-san said once, “we have failed.”
In 2003, Chef Mori moved to Tokyo, working in Ginza at two separate kaiseki houses before spending four years sourcing ingredients for Ryuzo — a two-starred restaurant whose ingredient network stretched from Hokkaido to Kyushu. Those sourcing years changed him. He began to understand that the most important decisions happen before the kitchen.
He arrived in New York in 2014, cooked for three years in a collaborative kitchen, and opened NORI in 2018 with eight counter seats, one menu, and no reservations system more complicated than a phone call.
That has since changed. The phone still works.
Sourcing
Chef Mori visits the Fulton Fish Market at 4am, three days a week. He does not arrive with a list. He arrives with questions.
Seven farms across New York, Vermont, and New Jersey. A mushroom forager in the Catskills. A yuzu grower in California whose trees Chef Mori met before the restaurant opened.
Wagyu from Miyazaki. Uni from Hokkaido and Kyushu. Sake from kura that do not export to the US — the result of fifteen years of relationships and two trips to Japan each year.
— The Room
The room was designed by Sato Architects (Tokyo / New York) around a single constraint: nothing should distract from what is happening at the counter. No music. No art on the walls. No scent diffusers.
The counter is a single piece of Kiso hinoki — Japanese cypress — sourced from a 200-year-old forest in Nagano. It was milled flat, left unstained, and oiled once a week with sesame. It smells faintly of wood and time.
The lighting above the counter is calibrated to match the warmth of natural afternoon light in a Kyoto machiya. The seats are hand-stitched natural linen over solid walnut.
The counter. 147 West 18th Street.
The Team
Executive Chef & Owner
Chef Mori trained for twelve years in Osaka before spending a decade in Tokyo's Ginza district. His philosophy begins with a single question: what is the ingredient telling us today? NORI is the answer he has been composing since 2018.
Sous Chef
A graduate of the Tokyo Culinary Arts Institute and former protégé of a three-Michelin-starred kappo in Kyoto, Chef Tanaka oversees the vegetable and dessert courses — the sequences most attuned to the calendar.
Sake Director
Certified Kikisake-shi (sake sommelier) and former buyer for Isetan Mitsukoshi. Akira's list focuses on small-production kura that most American diners will never encounter elsewhere, paired with the chef's current sequence.