Tempura Matsui – America's only Michelin-starred temple of frying

Tempura Matsui occupies the ground floor of The Nash apartment building on East 39th Street, a address so understated that first-time guests often walk past it twice. Opened on 14 July 2015, it became New York's first restaurant built entirely around a tempura omakase, and it remains the only Michelin-starred tempura counter anywhere in the United States. It holds One MICHELIN Star, a distinction the restaurant has now carried for ten consecutive years according to its own account of the 2025 MICHELIN Guide New York City. The name honours Masao Matsui, a Hokkaido-born chef who began frying at eighteen and spent more than four decades at some of Tokyo's most exacting counters before being coaxed out of retirement to open this room. Today the kitchen answers to executive chef Koichi Endo, who keeps faith with the technique that earned the star in the first place: a batter so fine it barely registers, lowered for seconds at a time into hot oil, piece by piece, in front of the handful of diners seated at the counter.

01The room and the setting

The entrance gives nothing away: a narrow door set into the base of a Murray Hill apartment block, with the real theatre only beginning once guests are seated. Located on the ground floor of The Nash apartment building, the restaurant has operated from this address since it opened in 2015. The dining room is built to echo a traditional Japanese house, with a sloping wooden roofline and paper-screened windows standing in for the usual Midtown décor. Most seats face the counter, where the frying happens a few feet away, though a private room exists for smaller parties of no more than five.

02The chef

The restaurant's story begins with Masao Matsui, a veteran tempura chef who got his start in the business in 1968, when he was 18, and who went on to run tempura counters across Japan, most recently at the Nadaman restaurant inside Tokyo's Hotel New Otani. He had already retired when Ootoya group founder Hisami Mitsumori persuaded him, at 65, to open a counter in New York, a project that debuted on 14 July 2015. Within weeks Matsui was forced back to Japan for health reasons, and the kitchen passed to his deputy, another Nadaman-trained cook who kept standards high enough that the restaurant earned its first Michelin star that same September. Since 2023 the counter has been run by executive chef Koichi Endo, whose daily frying routine was the subject of a Bon Appétit feature on 13 November 2025 that followed him through batter, oil temperature and sauce work on the line.

Insider tip

Dinner Tue–Sat, two sittings; lunch Fri–Sat at noon only. Reservations essential.

03The cooking

Everything here turns on what the restaurant calls the Matsui Way: a batter worked as thin as possible so that it barely coats the ingredient beneath it, named in tribute to the founder. Achieving that gossamer coating is a matter of method as much as recipe — ingredients are washed in fresh or salt water depending on whether they come from land or sea, dried on cloth, then dipped in a batter of egg, cold water and a soft, low-protein flour chosen specifically for its silkiness. Dinner runs as a full multi-course menu that opens with sashimi before moving through a long procession of tempura, so the kitchen is candid that it cannot currently offer a vegetarian version: the batter itself contains dashi, a fish-and-kelp stock, along with egg.

04What to order

The menu changes with the seasons, but certain pieces recur as showcases of the technique. The whole lobster tempura is served split and fanned with vegetables; tencha sets crisp tempura over a bowl of rice in dashi; anago, the saltwater eel, is fried until it shrinks to half its size and its flavour concentrates. Sea urchin arrives wrapped in a sheet of tofu skin, matsutake mushroom appears in autumn, and bigfin reef squid is scored and wrapped in shiso leaf before frying. Shrimp, prepared so that every part of it is eaten, remains the dish the kitchen considers its signature.

05When to go and booking

Each seating is limited to two and a half hours from the reservation time, and cancellations within 24 hours are charged in full. The restaurant closes for a short summer holiday most years and has previously marked its anniversary in July with limited additions such as a Wagyu tempura course and a matched drinks pairing, most recently for its tenth anniversary in 2025.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.