New Japanese Restaurant Will Focus on Vegan Sushi in Austin

A new Japanese vegan restaurant focused on sushi is opening in the Central Austin area this year. Nori will be found at 3208 Guadalupe Street, Suite B starting on Thursday, August 4 with limited service and menu.

The casual table-service restaurant will serve mostly sushi rolls, both classic like avocado and cucumber and larger “deluxe” ones. Then there will be gyoza, cauliflower wings, ramen, yakisoba, and a katsu. “We will offer a good mixture of fresh and local vegetables to mimic different fish flavors,” co-manager Javier Evequoz tells Eater, “and also some alternative meats for protein content.”

Behind Nori are the wife-and-husband team Daria Rudkova (owner and co-manager) and Evequoz, who are both vegans themselves. Rudkova’s father had run his own restaurant mini-chain Tokyo Sushi in Iceland since 2011, and she joined as a general manager in 2014. As she was finishing getting her master’s degree in hospitality from the Rosen College of Hospitality in Florida, she and Evequoz decided that they wanted to open something on their own. They decided on a vegan restaurant and picked Austin because they wanted to open “in a city where the vegan scene was well-established,” as Evequoz writes to Eater.

Originally, their intended restaurant was going to serve a bunch of different vegan dishes, but they decided to switch to vegan sushi during the pandemic because that’s what was familiar to them.

For Nori’s first week from Thursday, August 4 through Thursday, August 11, the restaurant will mostly only accept reservations with a few walk-in considerations, plus it’ll serve a limited menu. Come Friday, August 12, the full menu will be available and reservations will no longer be required.

When Nori is fully open, it will be open for dinner service and weekend brunch with indoor space (outdoor tables will come later). It took over a former location of Austin-area mini-chain Louisiana Crab Shack.