New Kansas City restaurant costs $175 for a meal. I had to find out: Is it worth it?

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I lied about the uni.

It was more of a lie of omission. Karson Thompson, the chef-owner of Sushi Kodawari, asked the eight of us seated at his Crossroads omakase counter if any of us hadn’t tried uni before.

Uni is sea urchin. They remove the spiky parts and serve you the gonads. It’s considered a delicacy. I’d never had it.

I looked around the room — all people in their 30s or 40s with enough disposable income to drop $175 on a single meal. One woman had already mentioned she’d attended Yale. No hands were up.

So I kept my hand down, too, like a coward. Thompson dropped off an uni nigiri in front of me. It looked like a small, wrinkled lemon atop a ball of rice.

I wish I could tell you it was some kind of palate-redefining technicolor experience, eating the uni. I actually didn’t like it all that much. It was briny and then sweet. There was a creaminess. It felt vaguely unsettling in my mouth, like a lot of delicacies from the sea. I took a big gulp off my dry German riesling and banished it from my throat. Then I nodded and made a thoughtful expression that I felt conveyed that I appreciated the uni’s complexities.

I am glad I ate it. When the subject comes up, I can now nod and casually say that, yes, I’ve had uni. Of course, that’s not the point of Sushi Kodawari, or the traditional Edomae omakase experience Thompson draws upon at his restaurant. (Omakase basically means there’s no set menu and each course is determined by the chef; the Edomae part is a style of sushi native to Tokyo Bay in the 1800s.)

But that’s not not the point. You learn some things, you acquire a few new food merit badges — it’s an educational experience.

It’s especially educational in Kansas City. Omakase restaurants have sprung up in recent years in America’s marquee cities — Chicago has at least 16 of them. But Kansas City has trailed behind. Aside from select occasions and one-night-only pop-ups, omakase has been absent from the local food scene.

Now we have Sushi Kodawari, which opened inside the Creamery building at 2100 Central St. in early June. Thompson serves Wednesday through Sunday. With just eight seats at the counter, that means 40 diners per week (though he told me he planned to soon increase to two dinners on the weekend nights).

You can’t just walk in. Every few weeks, Thompson announces the day and time that upcoming reservations open up, and if you want to get in, it’s probably best to get on Tock (via sushikodawari.com) at that day and at that time.

What it’s like

After somehow convincing the brass at The Star that it was in their best interests to pay for me to eat a $175 meal, I arrived with a friend at Sushi Kodawari a little before 6 p.m. on a Wednesday.

Thompson’s assistant, a pink-haired service-industry veteran named Beth Kearns, greeted us with small glasses of what I was later told was Gold Crush, a nonalcoholic wine alternative popular in Michelin-starred restaurants. (The restaurant is BYOB for now, but Thompson said he expects the liquor license to come through in a few weeks.) We sat on sleek benches in a lobby where a colorful painting of fish covered an entire wall.

The other guests looked … normal. Nobody was wearing overly formal or conspicuously stylish clothes. One guy was wearing Mizuno athletic shoes, and not in the cool way Gen Z kids wear them.

I excused myself to investigate the restroom, where, as I suspected, I found a high-tech Japanese toilet with a bidet and several electronic settings. I returned and Beth soon guided us past a black curtain into the dining area. We took our seats around a light wood counter.

Soon Thompson emerged from a back room and greeted us from behind the counter. I had an odd instinct to stand up, as for a judge, or clap like the star of a one-man show had taken the stage. I refrained.

A sushi chef at an omakase counter is a kind of performance, though, and Thompson in the role is an unlikely casting. A couple years ago, he was a corporate lawyer in Austin, Texas, with triplets. He still has the triplets — they’ve 5 now — but after his at-home sushi dabbling ratcheted up to an obsession, he decided to ditch the legal field, move back to the Midwest (he’s from rural Kansas and attended KU) and open Sushi Kodawari.

Thompson is dry, droll. I saw him smile only a few times the entire two-and-a-half hours I was seated at his counter. I am not sure if he’s like that outside the restaurant, but it makes a certain kind of sense in the context of the meal. If you’re dropping this much coin on a fairly exclusive sushi dinner, a little mystique enhances the vibe. He’s here to impart knowledge, not bro down with you.

He was polite, though, and had interesting stories to tell about Japan, and history, and the food. The meal was about 15 courses, most of them a single piece of nigiri, which is just a slice of fish on a ball of rice.

At the outset, Thompson patiently explained, although I think everybody there already knew, a few of the ways this meal would differ from one at a “rolls and bowls” sushi joint. He encouraged us to eat with our hands. If we wanted to use our chopsticks, he suggested the “forklift” technique, under and up, rather than the common pinching method. (Pinching is fine for sushi rolls, but with nigiri, which is not wrapped, it can be destabilizing.)

He set out some house-made soy sauce for each of us, but I didn’t see anybody touch it, for fear of insulting the chef. The wasabi that appeared with some dishes was not the “nuclear green paste,” as Thompson called it, that you find at American sushi restaurants.

“I’m sorry to say, but that stuff has no actual wasabi in it,” he said. “It’s just horseradish, mustard and food coloring.” Thompson used freshly grated Japanese wasabi, which is apparently quite hard to find around these parts.

The fish we ate

Here is a list of some of the fish we ate: kinmedai (golden eye snapper), aji (horse mackerel), ikura (salmon roe), makogarei (flounder), sake (ora king salmon). There was a sashimi platter with several cuts of fish. The meal opened with chawanmushi, a Japanese steamed egg custard served in a little tea cup.

The nature of the omakase experience is that it changes from night to night, week to week, month to month. If you go next week, you’re unlikely to eat all the same things I ate on that Wednesday night in mid-July.

“One thing I’m trying to do here is to get people to associate fish less with being ‘fresh,’” Thompson said. “I want the fish to be fresh when I get it, and then decide when and how to serve it.” The salmon we ate had been dry aged nine days, we were told.

I don’t want to spoil the small surprises or other parts of the experience. I went into it cold, and I think that’s the best way to do it. The uni I mentioned above was the only thing I struggled with; the rest was a blur of new flavors and new ideas. My brain was more full than my stomach by the time we left.

When I sat down to write this, I also found, to my astonishment, that I had actually retained a few of those facts. The best uni in the world comes from one of two places: Hokkaido, an island in northern Japan, and Santa Barbara, California. Sea urchin apparently thrive in their waters.

When my friend heard this, he immediately said, “Remember in ‘American Psycho’ when he says, ‘No can do, I’ve got an 8:30 res at Dorsia — great sea urchin ceviche’?” He cackled. He’s always quoting “American Psycho.”

“No,” I said, trying to be a serious food enjoyer at this temple of sushi.

I looked up. Thompson was right across the counter from us, using a paintbrush to apply soy sauce to the uni. I thought I saw him crack a smile. But I couldn’t be sure.