Nari

Nari occupies a two-story space inside the Hotel Kabuki in Japantown, and it reads nothing like a hotel restaurant. The design works nooks and curved booths and oversized windows around plants that spill off every ledge, somewhere between a greenhouse and a sauna, and the effect is immersive rather than decorative. You feel the ambition of the room before a single plate arrives.

The food backs it up. This is upscale Thai cooking built on the collision of spicy, sweet, and salty, pushed hard enough that certain dishes stay with you — the grilled squid and pork jowl in particular, a combination that earns repeat orders rather than novelty points. The kitchen isn't playing it safe with heat or with technique, and the plates that land hardest are the ones meant to.

A Michelin star in 2026 confirms what the room and the cooking already argue: this is a kitchen operating with real discipline, not just spectacle. The space could have been the whole pitch. Instead it's the frame around food aggressive enough to deserve it.