Thirty-seven floors above Fifth Avenue, a Moldovan chef is serving some of the rarest Wagyu in America to 12 people at a time. The setting is Yūgin, an omakase counter tucked inside Coco’s at Colette, a private members’ club in Manhattan’s General Motors Building. The beef is Omi Wagyu from Shiga Prefecture—the oldest Wagyu lineage in Japan, dating back more than 400 years—access to which Eugeniu Zubco spent years cultivating. In New York, he’s encountered it only once before: during his decade at Masa.
Zubco isn’t Japanese. In the omakase world, that still matters. He doesn’t pretend otherwise. “At the beginning, I was insecure,” he admits about opening Yūgin this past fall. “Many people would give me ‘the look’ when they came into the restaurant. Some would even ask if they could sit with another chef.” Over time, he came to see the doubt as an advantage. “If I could create amazing food, it made the experience even more special.”
