Nami Nori Is a Gluten-Free Gem

It's not just my opinion — ask Pharrell!

Before I was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2004, if you’d asked me to name my favorite cuisines, Japanese would’ve been high on that list. But one of the tougher things to accept about the diagnosis was that some cuisines were more off-limits than others. While wheat isn’t top of mind when you think about Japanese food, it’s omnipresent thanks to ingredients such as soy sauce, one of the “secret” sources of wheat people rarely think about.

But all those concerns go out the window at a restaurant like Nami Nori, which serves up phenomenal Japanese cuisine that is 100% gluten-free. Nami Nori was founded by three chefs — Taka Sakaeda, Jihan Lee, and Lisa Limb — who are partners in the business, all trained in fine Japanese dining and all Masa veterans. (Chef Sakaeda has celiac disease himself.) There’s now a fourth partner involved in the business, a celebrity who fell in love with the spot: Grammy Award–winning singer, songwriter, rapper, producer, and designer Pharrell. (More about that below.)

Nami Nori looks like a small, unassuming space — it’s decorated in soft, woodsy tones, and most of the seats are stacked up at one of the restaurant’s pair of counters. There are very few tables available (you’ll need to book well in advance if you want one). But sitting at the counter has its advantages, including the fact that you can watch the preparation of temaki — open-style sushi rolls that make up most of the menu.

Even at the counter, the service is stellar, with staff that checks in about allergies, offers recommendations, quickly refills water glasses, and makes sure the counter space doesn’t have an empty plate on it for more than a minute. I started with the highly recommended tuna crudo, which was incredibly fresh and flavorful, and the delicious nori chips (which looked like mini modernist art works).

For dinner, the recommended number of temaki is five, though everything is available a la carte, and you can choose whatever number you like. But I went with five, and I was glad I did. My favorites were the fried oyster temaki, the tuna + avocado, and the lobster tempura, but truthfully the California roll and the yellow tail + scallion were also excellent. I was tempted to try another hand roll, but I wanted to save some room for dessert. The warm mochurros served with lemon curd were heavenly (I enjoyed the poached-pear cake, too, but the mochurros were the best).

Nami Nori is part of a growing enterprise that now has four locations: in addition to the one I visited in Manhattan’s West Village, there’s an outpost in Williamsburg, (Brooklyn), Montclair (New Jersey), and most recently in Miami’s Design District (Florida). That last spot is part of the new partnership the original three chefs have with multihyphenate Pharrell. There are already plans to open a fifth restaurant in Virginia Beach, where Pharrell grew up. Here’s to a growing gluten-free empire.

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