By age 22, Brandon Cohanim was running two seafood concepts in West Village. He launched Pok the Raw Bar, a poké eatery, in 2017, partnering with his SMU classmates Jimmy Park and Francois Reihani, the now founder of La La Land Kind Café. A year later, Cohanim opened sushi concept Namo in the space next door.
Since then, much has changed: Pok the Raw Bar closed permanently during COVID, and Namo’s menu has expanded beyond hand rolls and evolved to include a new method of sourcing. “When the pandemic happened, I knew that I had to shift what I was doing and adapt to the world situation that we were living in at the time,” Cohanim says.
Namo’s initial approach—16 seats around a sushi bar and a menu that highlighted simple hand rolls, a few sashimi selections, one beer, one wine, and nitro green tea— was too limiting. The young