How We Choose What's on the Menu: Seasonal Fish & the Art of Sourcing

The menu at Kawa doesn't exist until the morning of service. There's no printed card, no fixed list of dishes decided weeks in advance. Each day begins with a conversation — with fishmongers, with suppliers, with whoever has something exceptional that arrived overnight — and the menu is built from there.

That's what omakase actually means. Not just "chef's choice" as a marketing phrase, but a genuine commitment to building the meal around seasonality, availability, and the week’s ingredients.

It Starts Before the Restaurant Opens

By the time most New Yorkers are awake, the sourcing decisions for that evening's menu have already been made. Relationships with fish suppliers in New York and Japan mean that Chef Tony knows what's coming in before it arrives — and conversations about quality, size, and availability happen early.

When something exceptional comes through — a particularly clean haul of bluefin, wild uni at peak season, a fish that doesn't appear often — the menu shifts to feature it. There's no rigid structure to protect. The goal is to serve what the season makes available.

Why Seasonality Matters at the Sushi Counter

Fish has seasons, just like vegetables. Uni from Hokkaido reaches its peak richness in late summer. Pacific king salmon runs in spring and early fall. Certain species of snapper change in winter, when cold water concentrates their fat. Cooking — or in this case, not cooking — around these rhythms produces food that tastes more alive.

At restaurants with fixed menus, seasonal ingredients get rotated in around an existing structure. At Kawa, the season is the structure. The progression of courses changes with availability, which means no two visits are exactly alike.

What's In Season, When

The Rice Is Never an Afterthought

In most conversations about omakase, the fish gets all the attention. But at Kawa, the rice is treated with equal seriousness. The variety, the water, the ratio of rice vinegar, salt, and sugar in the seasoning — all of it is calibrated to complement whatever fish is being served that evening. Nigiri is a two-ingredient dish. Both ingredients have to be right.

The rice is cooked for each service and seasoned for the omakase. Temperature matters too — nigiri rice is served warm, which is one reason eating each piece immediately matters so much.

Why This Makes Every Visit Different

Guests who come to Kawa regularly don't eat the same meal twice. The progression shifts with what's available. A piece of nigiri that appeared last month may not be back for weeks — not because it was removed from a menu, but because the fish that day wasn't quite right.

That's the honest version of omakase. Not a rotating fixed menu, but a genuine response to the season. It requires attention, flexibility, and a willingness to let the menu change.