Meet the $50 Strawberries That NYC’s High-End Chefs Are Fawning Over

The “Omakase berry,” grown at an indoor farm in Jersey, is popping up at Michelin-starred restaurants like Sushi Ginza Onodera and Atomix

At the end of October, diners at Sushi Ginza Onodera who indulged in the Michelin-starred restaurant’s $300 or $400 omakases would have ended their 19-course meal with a pair of whole strawberries. Head sushi chef Kazushige Suzuki presents them to diners as the dessert course, placed in a silver-flecked glass bowl without anything added, as if the strawberries were pieces of sashimi. But these juicy, aromatic, and tender strawberries are not the typical supermarket or even farmers market variety.

These are “Omakase berries,” a specialty fruit from a Kearny, New Jersey-based company called Oishii.

“The sweetness is completely different — I knew with my first bite I had found a berry on a different level,” Suzuki says. “The texture, then the burst of sweetness are such a pleasure that I decided to serve the strawberry whole as a dessert, not even cut.”

Suzuki’s not the only chef to feature them. Some of New York’s top chefs are embracing the fruit, which are grown in a vertical farm and come from Japanese seeds brought to the New York area by Oishii’s co-founder and CEO Hiroki Koga, an agriculture consultant and entrepreneur originally from Tokyo. They’ve also appeared recently at restaurants like Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, Atomix, and Sushi Yasuda, as well as at esteemed pastry shop Dominique Ansel Bakery.

These berries, some chefs say, boast a sweetness and creamy texture unlike any other strawberry in America. They look different, too: They are not oversized; their seeds are recessed into the flesh, giving them a pocked appearance; and the green leaves on top, called the calyx, stand at attention instead of wilting. Before any berries are picked, their sugar content is measured, landing ideally at 13 to 14 brix (brix are used to measure sugar levels; 1 degree brix is equal to 1 gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution), versus the typical 5 to 6 brix found in most strawberries. It’s the same way that vintners test the brix in grapes to know when to harvest.

And they’re always fresh. Oishii’s team plucks them at their peak ripeness — determined by farmers who are trained to identify a specific depth of red and a subtle glossy sheen on the surface of the berry — and transfers them by hand to the restaurants on the same day.

“Typically, a high-quality strawberry that one would be able to find in the U.S. is tart while sweet, and often it’s not perfectly ripe — either a little under, or a bit too ripe,” says Junghyun Park, executive chef of upscale Korean restaurant Atomix, which sometimes serves the berries in a dessert that combines salted strawberry, fresh sweet strawberry, and fermented strawberry with elderflower juice, perilla granita, and elderflower cream. “Oishii’s strawberries are much more balanced; it has a creamier texture, and the flavors are not sharp but more gentle and fragrant.”

It’s a prized flavor that’s taken years for Oishii to cultivate for New York.

In Japan, fruit is more expensive, and there’s a culture of high-end fruit; a pair of luxury melons once sold for more than $27,000 at auction. Inspired by the appreciation for fruit, Koga spent a decade researching agriculture, vertical farming, and strawberry cultivation in Japan in order to bring the country’s superior fruit to New York City, where he thinks the most discerning chefs in the world reside.

“If we could succeed in this extremely competitive environment, we will be successful anywhere else,” Koga says. In 2017, he teamed up with Brendan Somerville, a former Marine who was part of a startup in Africa related to avocados, to build a New Jersey warehouse.

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