The first object you meet is a Meiji-era byōbu, a two-panel screen on which a sedge of cranes gathers at a painted water's edge under bands of gold-dust cloud, the whole composition set in a black-lacquer frame and rendered in mineral pigment on mulberry paper. It came out of Naga Antiques, the Marinaccio family gallery that has been moving museum-grade Japanese objects through New York since 1971, and it stands now 37 stories above Grand Army Plaza, with the mansard roof of the Plaza Hotel pitched into the window glass behind it like a second piece of art the room happens to own.

That, more or less, is the gambit at YŪGIN, which opened in September 2025 inside Coco's at Colette—the dining wing of the private members' club at the top of the General Motors Building, whose interiors were designed by Juan Santa Cruz—and which has, in a city that has spent a decade cycling through omakase counters in basements and hotel mezzanines and restored downtown townhouses, done something none of them attempted: it lifted the boîte into the sky. The counter is, in fact, two counters of six seats apiece, both milled from the same 200-year-old hinoki cypress and flown over from Japan as a single unit, and the wood matters because hinoki is the species the Japanese have rebuilt the Ise Grand Shrine from every 20 years for 13 centuries, a ritual of ceremonial impermanence to which YŪGIN is plainly tipping its hat. The chef who works the counter, Eugeniu Zubco, is a Masa veteran whose first restaurant this is.

To understand how unusual the room is in design terms, it helps to know what Santa Cruz usually does. The Chilean restaurateur, Babson-trained and Buenos Aires-launched, made his New York name with the maximalism of Casa Cruz on East 61st, where de Gournay wallpapers climb the stairwell behind a three-dimensional Keith Haring and the rooftop canopy is cut from Johanna Ortiz rose; his London rooms—Casa Cruz on Clarendon Road and Isabel in Mayfair—are clad in copper, emerald velvet and padded silk brocade; and Obvio, the NoMad supper club he opened last spring with John Fraser, took the Americas' best standalone bar at the 2025 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards largely on the strength of giraffe-print silks woven for him in Italy. YŪGIN, by contrast, is the closest thing in the whole portfolio to a vow of silence—almost exclusively using hinoki, washi, black lacquer and ivory ultrasuede—and the contrast becomes the design's most interesting tension as a counter-argument to its surrounds inside the same building.

The GM tower, Edward Durell Stone's 1968 monolith of vertical Georgia marble, presides over Grand Army Plaza, the Pulitzer Fountain and Saint-Gaudens' gilded Sherman astride his horse, and its 37th floor—held in joint venture by Boston Properties and the Safra family, who own Colette, was conceived as a private aerie requiring a reported six-figure initiation fee.

Coco's threads its way around the elevator core, and YŪGIN occupies the corner with the windows that no one else in Manhattan can replicate, because nobody else has a sushi counter situated at roughly 500 feet of elevation overlooking the city's emblematic green lung. What Santa Cruz has done inside is exact in a way the rest of his work declines to be. The hinoki millwork carries no visible hardware; a single sculptural paper lantern drifts above the counters with the implausibility of a low cloud; two tall vases hold cherry-blossom branches against the glass; and the deep oxblood lacquer that flows through the rest of Coco's is held back at the perimeter so that the counter itself stays pale and almost devotional.

Chef Zubco is Moldovan, freshly into his 30s, and he came to Japanese cuisine by an unlikely route—line cook in Chișinău, seven months in Phu Quoc, then a decade in Columbus Circle under Masa Takayama himself, with no apprenticeship in Japan. The room's name plays on yūgen, the Noh-theater concept of veiled depth, as well as on his own nickname. Zubco hand-draws a menu for every guest before service: a small ink sketch of each course in sequence, dated, signed and inscribed honored to have you, which arrives at the end of the night.

The bowls and plates are also frequently his own, thrown in a Brooklyn studio he has kept since the Masa years; the dark stoneware vessel that carries the trout and caviar is his, as is the small footed dish that arrives with the scallop and truffle. "Running an omakase is hard work, you know—you're negotiating for the best fish at the market that morning," he says. "Going to Brooklyn to get hands-on and creative in another way is truly relaxing." The other tell of his thoughtfulness is uni. He is obsessed with it, and obsessed in particular with how much of it a guest can be given without comment, piling it onto rice and into shells with incredible generosity.

The design is the frame and the chef is the picture, and the word that ends up doing the most work in the room is intimacy. Twelve people, one chef, an hour and a half during which Fifth Avenue keeps doing whatever it does at 37 floors below—sirens, headlights, the slow rotation of traffic around the Plaza—silently, behind glass, at a remove that begins to feel like a wholly different city instead of the same one viewed from above. The skill is undeniable, the candor keeps the skill from curdling into ceremony, and the room is the rare design object in this city built to slow a stranger down rather than impress one. What you carry with you is harder to name and harder to forget.