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

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.

The environment for the strawberries is highly controlled. Oishii employs agriculture experts, farmers, mechatronic engineers, and scientists to ensure the conditions of the warehouse mimic the ecosystem of Japan’s best strawberry-growing regions. Specifically, the foothills of the Japanese Alps have a mild, dry climate that strawberries thrive in, Koga says. Because this variety has evolved to match its native environment, even slight changes in climate will have significant negative effects on flavor, size, and coloring. By copying the Japanese environment inside the warehouse, Oishii tries to consistently produce its premium strawberry all year without using pesticides.

The company started business with restaurants in 2018, believing that chefs are the gatekeepers to the culinary world. Koga and Somerville visited more than 20 chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants and five-star hotels to test, including Cesar Ramirez, the executive chef at Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare. He was impressed, and began serving it on its own as part of his tasting menu. Diners who had eaten it there started spreading the word, and Oishii’s Instagram account connected them to more chefs.

The big appeal for chefs is that consistently quality strawberries are notoriously difficult to source. By nature, strawberries are highly seasonal, and they’re vulnerable to bruising and molding during transit, a problem considering most of the ones in New York are shipped from California or Mexico. And while New York state is home to the beloved diminutive Tristar variety, available a few months out of the year, that berry may soon be no longer for this world.

“Because [Oishii] strawberries are warehouse grown, they’re available all year round, so that makes a huge difference,” says Dominique Ansel. “While there are certain other varieties of strawberries that grow naturally in spring and summer months and have amazing flavor, they’re quite short-lived and often hard to get here in NYC.”

Suzuki, the head chef of Sushi Ginza Onodera, says he hadn’t tasted a strawberry with a similarly “remarkable creamy texture” since he left Japan in 2016. “The aroma brought me back to my childhood in Japan,” he says. Diners have been surprised when presented with the berries as the final course in his omakase, Suzuki says, but they tend to come around after tasting it.

Oishii [Official]

Today, the strawberries occasionally appear on tasting menus in courses or in cocktails, and they also pop up at one-off events, like the one at Dominique Ansel and a recent one at Brooklyn Kura, where they were paired with sake.

They’re now also available to anyone in New York City. A carton of eight strawberries in a sushi-style box costs $50, which includes delivery to a pick-up location at the World Trade Center and a tasting with a member of the Oishii team.

“It’s a great showcase of what a strawberry can be,” Park says, “and I hope that diners are able to approach what can be considered a common fruit in its optimal form, and see it anew.”

ATOMIX

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