Blue Ribbon Sushi Izakaya Visited 7/30/2012 4 Forks

Blue Ribbon Sushi Izakaya 187 Orchard St., (between Houston St & Stanton St), New York

I have been to most of the Blue Ribbon restaurants in New York, so it just made sense for me to try their newest outpost.  The restaurant is located inside the Thompson Hotel in the LES but it's apparently not related to the hotel, they just lease the space from them.  The restaurant is fairly large with an dark, more cozy area to the left, a bar area with booths to the right and a lovely outdoor garden in the back (we didn't notice this until after we finished our dinner and I totally wished we ate out there instead).  Blue Ribbon Sushi Izakaya is a mixture of sushi and Japanese small plates, making the menu gigantic and 6+ pages long.  Jenn and I basically had to enlist the help of our server because the menu was just so overwhelming.  Ultimately we decided on:  beef short rib skewer ($4), pork meatball skewer ($3), rock shrimp tempura ($18), shishito peppers ($10), half order of the squid, squid ink and uni fried rice ($15), and 4 pieces of the pork ribs ($13).  If it sounds like a lot of food, well it is.  

The two skewers were small (each skewer has 3 small pieces of each meat) but really packed with a lot of flavor and I actually thought the best dishes of the meal.  The beef short rib melted in my mouth and it had a bit of a buttery taste to it.  The meatball was served with a sesame glaze and was juicy and a perfect bite size of meat.  Next time I'm here, I would just order a bunch of skewers, especially since they are so much more affordable than the rest of the menu.  Next came the peppers, which I've had in other places before.  These were cooked just right and served with a nice heaping of salt on them. I've had these peppers in some other places where they weren't cooked all the way through and the seeds were still really hot (hot as in spicy not in temperature).  But these were all pretty mild in terms of heat but still held on to the green pepper flavor.  I've had the shrimp tempura before at the regular Blue Ribbon and it's always a winner.  But I do wish for $18, there was more shrimp.  The shrimp are lightly battered and served with aioli mayo and with each bite, you can actually taste the shrimp underneath.  I was actually pretty surprised by the pork ribs.  I thought that for sure they would be small and while they were small in length they definitely made up for it in thickness.  The ribs were covered in black vinegar and crispy rice and while they weren't fall of the bone immediately, once you figured out where to cut into the rib, the meat did fall off the bone easily.  To me, the best indicator of a good rib is if the bone is clean as a whistle at the end (ideally it should come off in one bite but I'll give some leeway if the meat needs a bit of help).   It was super fatty and meaty and they were incredibly filling.  I wish that they had an order with only 2 pieces because even though it was good, it was kind of hard to put down so much fatty meat with all the other food we were eating.  Sadly the dish I was most looking forward to was the most disappointing one.  I love love squid ink pasta and uni, so when I saw that they had a fried rice that both of these ingredients, I was thrilled.  But this dish was just so underwhelming.  There wasn't a lot of flavor and mixing the uni in with the rest of the dish.  It was just blah, so I'm glad we got just the half size.

Like Spanish tapas places, going to a restaurant like this is really best suited for larger groups than just 2 people.  There are so many dishes to try and it's just so hard when there's only 2 people.  I would most definitely come back and try more skewers, other small plates and some sushi to make it healthier.  The prices are $3-5 more than I would prefer to pay.  Total bill with 2 glasses of wine each: $70/pp with tax and tip.

Photo Credit:Yelp