Who Knew: Secrets, Sushi, and Secret Sushi

‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market.

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My secret: I turned 49 this week. And honestly, it was a bit on-the-nose of my body to awaken on the morning of my latest birthday with a pinched lumbar nerve. Creatively speaking, I’d prefer a subtler introduction to this new and somewhat mystifying age. Unable to do much more than hobble at a decidedly prawnlike angle and feel sorry for myself, I told my husband that all festivity was physically impossible. Because walking and tilting my head up to look at things are both out of the question this week, we scuttled our semi-sophisticated plans of a New York lunch and museum visit followed by a hotly anticipated, tariff-expedited, Supermarket Sweep-style rip through Bergdorf Goodman’s shoe department. Andrew, ever patient and probably somewhat relieved, supplied me with a (strictly medicinal) bedside ramekin of Cadbury Mini Eggs and ambled off to hop on a work call.

All the same, the day wasn’t without surprises. By lunchtime, the mini eggs had kicked in, and I could shamble as far as the car. For months, an in-the-know friend had been imploring me to check out Izumi Sushi Cafe, a secret sushi place only open for lunch, tucked away on the ground floor of an office building on High Ridge Road. It’s the sort of spot you’d know about if you worked in the neighborhood, but otherwise, could blaze past a thousand times on the Merritt before ever setting foot inside. It’s also the kind of place that nets an elusive 4.9 in Google Reviews–anyone who knows it exists clearly loves it. 

The flying saucer building that houses Izumi Sushi Cafe on its ground floor is part of a 1967 office park, itself worth a gander, designed by Victor Bisharat, a Jordan-born modernist architect and major contributor to Stamford’s corporate HQ skyline. Characterized by bold curves and futuristic elements, Bisharat’s work was sometimes controversial in Stamford. This perfectly round building serves curvilinear optimism in the manner of Eero Saarinen, who you know from JFK’s iconic Terminal 5, now the TWA hotel. Like Tomorrowland at Disney, the form brims with smiling, Space Age parabolas even as the material realities of modern architecture catch up with its gutters and cladding. “The future is here,” it seems to say, “and whether those boring, rectangular strip malls up and down High Ridge Road care to acknowledge it, we’re about to do some Futuristic Business.” 

Inside the building’s atrium, a velociraptor prop from Jurassic Park greets you (because why not), but there’s no sign of sushi. A one-floor elevator ride down and a short walk down a curving hallway later, where you might expect to find an orthodontist or an insurance office, you’ll instead discover an expedient sushi menu on a flatscreen. You’ve arrived.

The Ault tendency to overorder sushi is inescapable; we’re the to-go orderers who consistently, embarrassingly get five sets of chopsticks when only two of us are eating. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have stopped talking after I ordered one fancy roll. Because I didn’t, we wound up with five rolls and an appetizer of chicken and pork dumplings. This feast was impossible to finish in one sitting, but we tried our best. The rolls are enormous–an excellent value for money–and satisfyingly well-constructed, with veggies and fish that taste exceptionally fresh. The crab is surimi (i.e., not so much crab as krab), and while purists generally seek out the real deal, I wasn’t mad at it for the price. Each fancy roll comes with miso soup or a good-sized side salad of spring greens, tomato, cucumber, and carrot, and we somehow scored a shrimp tempura appetizer for not being angry when the friendly server told us they were out of yellowtail. 

(Related question: Do grown adults really have regular meltdowns over the availability of yellowtail?)

We recommend ordering the Spicy Lover, the Rainbow Roll, and the dumplings. The view’s a little odd–a mid-demolition cross section of the building across the way and a circular pond that seemed a bit desolate on the coldest, windiest day in early April. But the warmth of the service and the joy of finding your way to a secret sushi hideout more than make up for it. 

As I hobbled back to the car, Andrew said, “I had no idea this was here.. I feel like I’m in the Houston suburbs or something.”

The following night, because my back prevents me from leaving the house more than once a day, we ventured to Bar Bushido. 

Far less likely to be confused with any Texan suburb, Norwalk’s Wall Street Historic District has undergone a quiet renaissance lately. Everyone knows about SoNo; it’s been the locus of aggressive zhuzhing in decades past and has the raw bar menus to prove it. But the rest of downtown Norwalk felt like Bed-Stuy in the ‘90s; quieter, with neighborhoods much as they’d always been, nary an Edison bulb, shrimp bloody mary, or influencer in sight. This is also undoubtedly why I prefer it, although lately, Wall Street is

waking up. Rumor has it that the Norwalk Art Space has the best breakfast in Fairfield County, while around the corner, Greer’s Southern Table nails brunch (more on this in the coming months!) We’ve already covered my Taco Guy obsession, and while I won’t belabor it again here, please don’t sleep on Taco Guy. The revamped District Music Hall has been booking some great performers–Rufus Wainwright and Of Montreal played recently, and Parliament Funkadelic is coming in May. My point being: if SoNo is the showroom, Wall Street is the workshop. It’s got the early adopter energy that can make a newly 49-year-old New Canaan resident in reading glasses and, surely soon, a back brace, feel almost… cool?

Chef and restaurateur Jeff Taibe has been in the vicinity for a while, having relocated his local, seasonal, and truly exceptional restaurant, Taproot, from Bethel to the old Bruxelles space in 2023. Taibe, whose culinary experience includes work in Singapore, and his brother Bill’s iconic Kawa Ni in Westport, opened Bar Bushido this January at 51 Wall Street. In Japanese, Bushidō translates to “the way of the warrior” and describes a samurai’s code of ethics. I was instantly smitten by a few trips to Bar Bushido’s front space, so much so that I didn’t wholly realize (until I ran into all-knowing Terry Dinan over the soup bar at Walter Stewart’s) that there was a speakeasy-style temaki-ya (handroll bar) behind an unmarked door at the back. It’s like the dream where you discover an unused and forgotten room in your house, but it’s food. 

Let’s talk about the front space first: an izakaya is a Japanese bar that also serves food, usually small, inexpensive dishes to help ballast the drinker against the impact of all that whiskey/ sake/ beer so they can linger a while. Bar Bushido’s delivery of that promise is vibrant and casual; an exceptional hip hop playlist that makes me feel exquisitely seen, with sumo wrestling on the TV, a panoply of familiar band and skate stickers on the wall, and a fever dream of a bar program with punny names to boot. It will take me months of visiting to try every cocktail that sounds interesting, but the Umami Dearest (shiitake mezcal, fernet, creme de cacao, vermouth) and the Yoga Pants (lotus vodka, cucumber, vermouth, lemon, shiso) both have my thumbs up.

Side note: Sumo wrestling is surprisingly elegant and quite beautiful to watch. Also, one of the prizes wrestlers can win is an enormous porcelain teacup. Clearly, this beats UFC any day of the week.

Keep scrolling down the QR code menu, and you’ll find a well-edited menu of yakitori, ramen, and some phenomenal fried proteins. You absolutely cannot skip the Okinawa potato salad: beautiful purple sweet potatoes (actually native to the Americas, but perfected in Japan) with smoked egg, carrot, and scallions. “I love this,” said Robin Bates-Mason on a recent Gen X-er’s night out, “and I usually hate potato salad.” The smashed wagyu burger on Japanese milk bread gets a resounding endorsement from Andrew. 

If I never had to put on a pair of jeans again, I would dive headfirst into a pile of chicken kara age (nuggets of chicken thigh, coated in a cloud of potato flour and deep-fried,

served with lime salt, brown butter kewpie mayo, and spicy kara age sauce) and never look back. The menu is a bit light on vegan options, which isn’t exactly a dealbreaker for me, but I’d be happy to see a few more veggies, like oshinko pickles or a salad.

Back to the back room: the temaki-ya is a handroll bar, housed in a sexy, low-lit back room, with reeded wood paneling and a totally different, but equally captivating, playlist. If the front room sees you mouthing along to Protect Ya Neck, the back room will find you Shazaming a Leon Bridges deep cut. And the menu follows suit: more subtlety in the cocktails, more careful intention behind the handroll pairings, and overall, a more exalted and librarylike atmosphere. Meal-sized handroll sets are named for the ethical principles of Bushido, and I tried “compassion”, a four-roll setup that included an outstanding mushroom jam that oozed umami, a cornmeal-crusted fried oyster, sea trout with roe, and spicy tuna. 

Andrew opted for “loyalty,” which also included Maine uni, Hokkaido scallop, and toro. Each roll is exquisite, and rather than serving them in standard, conical handroll shapes, they arrive with the nori wrappers in a separate envelope, so you can pick up a nori, grab the insides with your little seaweed claw, and eat the whole assembly in a few bites, like a taco. It’s not just the novel format that makes the experience; it’s an honor-bound reinvention of what most Westerners believe sushi to be–what’s inside is just as worthy as how it’s presented. And that’s what I dig most about Taibe’s work: in an atmosphere where restaurants tend get traction for their extrinsics, like aesthetics, galling pricing strategies, or putting a freaking seafood tower on a bloody mary straw, his team’s attention to detail pervades every corner of this restaurant and its two distinct experiences.

Bar Bushido doesn’t just borrow the name from samurai culture; it seems to cook by the code. You can sense the Bushidō throughout: precision without pretense, balance without bravado. Rectitude in the knife work. Respect in the plating. Restraint from gimmickry. And, thank god, ’90s hip hop bumping through the speakers to make my generation feel like we still have a place in this world.

When my back allows, I’ll be on the lookout for more juicy secrets to share with you here. Until then, to unforgivably butcher the sacred words of the Wu-Tang Clan: protect ya lumbar spine.