Paul Weiss has its own restaurant - and yes, the sushi is also 'market-leading'

Paul Weiss has revealed that its London office includes its very own sushi restaurant - run by a "market-leading sushi chef."

The detail surfaced in a new promotional video on the firm’s LinkedIn careers page featuring leveraged finance star and London co-head Neel Sachdev, who says the restaurant - called Air, after the firm’s Air Street address in Soho - was designed "to create an environment that encourages high in-office attendance."

Soho sushi

The addition of an in-house sushi bar fits Paul Weiss’s ultra-luxury approach to its London relaunch. The firm moved into the former UK headquarters of Twitter on the Soho/Mayfair border after its headline-making London relaunch in 2023, completing a top-spec refit earlier this year.

The choice of location, in the heart of London’s private capital district, reflected its ambitions to build a market-leading private equity practice under star hires including Neel Sachdev and Roger Johnson.

The firm has also launched a UK training contract, with the first 10-strong cohort starting in 2026. Trainees will earn £60,000 in their first year, £65,000 in their second, and £180,000 on qualification - the joint-highest package in London.

A nod to sushi history

The sushi theme, however, has an unexpectedly long lineage at Paul Weiss. Two decades ago, just as LinkedIn was getting started as it happens, the firm went viral over what became known as the "Sushi Memo."

As The New York Times reported back in 2003, the story goes that a partner in New York once enlisted a paralegal to research the best sushi in the city after an unsatisfactory takeout order, resulting in a three-page formal memo with eight footnotes and two exhibits of menus.

Twenty years on, you could say that the firm’s new Soho sushi bar marks a more literal continuation of that legacy.