The walls at Sushi Noz can talk, no doubt—the storied material speaks to the Edo-era cuisine. But the real question is: Do they breathe?

“Ninety-nine percent of the restaurant is made out of natural elements,” says owner Joshua Foulquier, eyeing the glowing emergency exit sign with subtle shade, “barring the electric lights.” The eight-seat sushi bar, a forest of craftsmanship, opened last month in New York. But it was actually finished months earlier in Kyoto, Japan—until it was dismantled, shipped in 45-foot containers, and painstakingly reassembled over the course of eight weeks.

It stands today on the Upper East Side, over 1,000 pieces of river stones, cedar, cypress, and Japanese ash—all held together without a single nail.

By nature, the tiny marvel belies every inch of craftsmanship by Kyoto’s Sankakuya, an architecture firm which, until starting the design process of Sushi Noz almost three years ago, had never built a restaurant outside of Japan. Their specialty, Sukiya, the rarefied architecture of tearooms, keeps them busy in Kyoto where they almost exclusively work on historic temples.

Sushi Noz. Photo: Alex Krauss

Articulating Japanese authenticity—and, at times failing to—is something like a near-religious pursuit to discerning Americans; Japan’s often ritualistic design is nothing new, having enamored the West since the closed-nation opened its doors in the 19th century. As Tokyo emerged as a design capital, our commercial interpretations have, at times, been a rough translation (hackneyed motifs of geisha and samurai are, hopefully, a thing of the past). But Japanese craft is met with open arms, and mouth; sushi bars continue to flourish, ramen shops stir, and sake breweries are the latest to swell. Thoughtful hospitality embraces the tools of tradition.

“We’re not trying to manufacture a fake experience,” says Foulquier, nodding to a scalloped wooden surface utilizing Naguri, an age-old technique only a handful of craftsmen are trained to do, and so extravagantly bespoke that he likens it to having a Baccarat chandelier (it’s impossible not to see the human touch). “Having the artist present is very important.”

Balazs Bognar, a Tokyo-based architect at Kengo Kuma & Associates, reflects that capturing "Japanese-ness" in contemporary design is “not a matter of copying appearances but learning from how and why it got that way, and bringing it forward to current context. That is: It need not look Japanese to be Japanese,” he demurs. “Aesthetics are a by-product of a more meaningful search, one that relates the human experience to nature, to the world around us, all the way down to texture and detail.”