I am still hungry after last night's dinner.

Friends worked very hard to get us a reservation at this "extremely exclusive" sushi place in Manhattan - on 73rd Ave and York St. As they put it "only due to the bad weather there was a miraculous cancellation" and that's why we managed to get in. I am always suspicious of "exclusive" places, but I have to admit that I was also curious.

You can't just walk in there, for they have seatings. Ours is the last - at 9pm -, and we are required to be there on time or a little early. I like that. I am a punctual person, so no problem. We get there at 8:55pm and the place is still full - all seats occupied AND people already waiting inside. We stand outside the door, patiently waiting. The waiter sees us, and after some indecisive movements comes out and leads us into the next door Japanese place, where they welcome us to sit down and wait.

At 9:25pm (forget punctuality!) they came to get us. The "shush restaurant" is a hole in the wall - no tables, just a bar with 12 chairs. The waiter tries calling out names to seat us, but the process is far from smooth, since "Andrew" is getting transformed into "Aan-lu", and nobody recognizes himself as that person. It's a BYOB place, and we all take advantage of it right away, once everybody has a chair. The bar, behind which stand the sushi chefs, has two levels and on the higher one, in front of everybody, there is a small wooden tray with some pickled ginger on top of it and one empty glass for the alc. But no menu. For that there are two rows of paper sheets on the wall - one row called "appetizer" and the other  "shushi", and on each sheet there is a name  - like "Crab brain". Nothing more, nothing less.

The waiter comes and asks if "we don't eat something", and we explain that one of us does not like sea urchin. Then he asks if we want "???" We look at each other, shrug our shoulders and ask if we want "what"? He repeats the question using the same, unknown word. We ask what that is, but with this question we hit on the limit of his English vocabulary, and get no answer. He gets angry and repeats the same uninformative question again. We decide that we should probably want the "???", as later do all the others in the room.

That mystical order turns out to be sushi pieces that the chef prepares - only one piece per person -, puts on the small, wooden tray for you, and announces what it is. (You'd better not move the wooden tray, like I did, because it makes the chef unhappy, and he doesn't' give you food.) The sushi is made with everything they think you might need, and so they don't give you even soy sauce. Both, the waiter and the chef got quite offended when I asked for some. You should have seen the nervous jumps the waiter was doing on my side every time I dipped my sushi in the tiny puddle of soy sauce he brought me. At some point he came to me and reached as if to extract the small, problems causing bowl, but then thought better of it, and let me continue with my desecrating practice, while satisfying himself with disapprovingly shaking his head. Enjoy your dinner!

Aside from the fact that in my honest opinion the sushi did need soy sauce to give it more taste, most of it was quite good actually. Bland but good. And little. In the course of 1.5h, after getting 2 appetizers to share, each one of us was given about 10-12 single pieces of sushi, and a lot of water refills. I am really not a big eater, and yet even I didn't feel I got enough food. (Thank the gods for calories in alcohol!)

Around 10:30pm they announced that that was it, and that if we want more, we can order "a la card", which some of us did - a total of 6 pieces, and then the bill came… $115 per person!!! And bear in mind that there is no alcohol included in this price…  $115 per person!?!?! Wait for 30 min to be seated, have a waiter, who doesn't speak the language, endure his grunting about the soy sauce, watch the chef throw your sushi in front of you, and that only if you place the tray where he wants you to, stay hungry because face it - not even a girl can get full with 15 bites of food, and pay $115 for it!?! I, the Eastern European,  call this jumping through hoops and being treated like crap. My American friends called it "small business trying to stay local, and keep the neighborhood to the locals". I will let you be the judge.