Wat Sang Sushi & More
Japanese sushi and ramen in Gan HaShmal area
- 📍
- HaRakevet 12, Tel Aviv
Wat Sang Sushi & More sits at HaRakevet 12, on the corner of Levontin behind the old customs house — a quiet edge of the Gan HaShmal district, the artsy central Tel Aviv pocket of design studios, small bars and independent kitchens. It is a chef’s sushi bar in the Tokyo sense: a long counter at the centre of the room, the chef working in front of you, the menu treated as a craft rather than a checklist. For a city where “sushi” too often means an assembly-line salmon roll, Wat Sang is one of the addresses serious eaters point newcomers toward.
The restaurant is the independent venture of two people who spent more than two decades side by side at Moon, one of Tel Aviv’s oldest and most respected sushi houses — chef Wat Sang in the kitchen and Zohar Shterek running the floor. After roughly 24 years together there, they left to build the place they had been imagining: somewhere that holds onto Japanese authenticity while honouring an Israeli identity, as Shterek has put it — meticulous and invested, but unpretentious enough for a weeknight. Their timing was brutal. The opening was set for October 9, 2023; the war intervened, and they opened instead with a soft launch in early November, days into a period when few people were starting restaurants at all.
The cooking rewards the credentials. The fish is the headline — carefully sourced, with seasonal bluefin tuna and imported premium ingredients, down to rice brought in from Japan. Beyond the maki, sashimi, nigiri and Osaka-style pressed battera, there are around fifteen special rolls and a genuine kitchen behind the bar: chicken and shrimp ramen simmered for nine hours, seared scallop with rice-milk cream, salmon in miso with Japanese squash, agedashi tofu, miso eggplant, vegetables in delicate tempura, and skewers off a robata grill. Drinks run to sake, Japanese beer, natural wines and house cocktails built on matcha, yuzu and sesame.
The room matches the food — quality wood, modern lighting, a counter that anchors everything, plus quieter corners for couples and larger tables for groups. It is not cheap; a full meal with drinks tends to land in the 150–360 NIS range, and the place has become popular enough that booking ahead is wise. For Tel Aviv’s Japanese community and for Israelis chasing the real thing, Wat Sang has quickly become a neighbourhood fixture worth the reservation.