Longtime Uchiko veterans open intimate sushi restaurant Craft Omakase in Central Austin

Several Uchiko employees with more than 30 years of experience at Austin’s grandest sushi destination are opening their own sushi restaurant in the shadow of the place where they all worked together.

Craft Omakase opens Wednesday at 4400 N. Lamar Blvd. Suite 102 in the space that was home to the Steeping Room for years. But unlike the place where the team spent its formative years, Craft is a small, 12-seat omakase-only experience.

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The sushi counter restaurant is the creation of Charlie Wang and Nguyen Nguyen, both former executive sushi chefs at Uchiko, and long-time front-of-house presence Tim Boyer. They are joined in the project by general manager Juliana Fry, whom Austin dining and cocktail lovers will remember from her time at East Side Showroom and her stint as bar manager at Kemuri Tatsu-Ya from its opening until last year.

The restaurant will serve 20-course meals that include nigiri bites and composed dishes. The nigiri is meant to focus and highlight the flavor of the fish, a process that is amplified through a process of in-house dry aging. The composed dishes, like sea trout roulade surrounding shrimp mousse with truffle and seasonal greens resting in shrimp bisque, have "more overt complexity of flavor and intense preparation," Fry told the American-Statesman.

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"We also really want to provide the best examples of some more traditional preparations in dishes like our winter vegetable with soy-braised daikon and shiitake with a genmaicha broth," Fry said. "We've found a lot of balance there, trying to showcase technique and attention to detail without taking away from the ingredients themselves, even in dishes that naturally have more components. Our dishes really don't include anything unless it's meaningful to the experience of enjoying them."

Craft Omakase is open Wednesday-Sunday, with seatings at 6 and 8:30 p.m. Prepaid reservations on Tock cost $175 per person before beverage service, which include wine, sake and beer. Reservations are released each Sunday for the following week.

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This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: New sushi restaurant Craft Omakase opens in Austin