Ootoya Visited 4/19/2013 4 Forks

Ootoya 8 W 18th St., (between Avenue Of The Americas & 5th Ave), New York, NY 10011

Apparently Ootoya is a popular chain restaurant in Japan, but this is their first States side opening.  I had read that it was best to get their early and I got there at 6:30pm but it was still a 1+  hour wait.  Oy.  Luckily there are a bunch of great shopping options nearby, so the hour flew by.  My mom and I were seated at the "sushi" bar which was fine, even though it's really NOT a sushi place here at all but there are also several tables and a 2nd floor as well. 

The extensive menu here is not focused on sushi at all but rather all the other great kinds of Japanese food that people sometimes forget about such as homemade tofu dishes, yakitori, grilled meats not on a stick, katsu dishes, hot pot, rice bowls, chirashi, dons, and soba noodles.  It was totally overwhelming because everything sounds great but there were only two of us, so we paired it down to 3 dishes.  We opted for the fried cod appetizer, the mini salmon don ($9) and the bara chirashi ($25) - we didn't get the box set option which you can order with any of the dishes for an extra $3 and it includes rice, miso soup, homemade pickles, and an egg custard.  None of those extras really spoke to me so I didn't feel the need to order the set.  The fried cod was the daily special and it was 4-5 medium sized chunks of cod lightly battered and fried.  It was served with large pieces of lettuce and vegetables such as broccoli, eggplant, potato, and carrots.  Everything was lightly covered in a thick black vinegar like sauce but it wasn't overwhelming or too  much.  I think we were supposed to have wrapped the fish and veggies in the lettuce but instead we just ate everything individually so it was kind of weird to munch of a random lettuce at the end but oh well, it was still delicious.  Next came the salmon don and chirashi at the same time.  The mini don had about 4-5 melt in your mouth pieces of salmon and about 2 full spoonfuls of fresh salmon roe and served on a bed of very tasty sushi rice.  What I love about don dishes is that you an focus on 1 type of fish and salmon is definitely one of my favorite.  My gripe with this dish is that it's really hard to eat rice with chopsticks but then it's also difficult to eat sashimi with a spoon, so I kept switching between the two different utensils to get a good feel for this dish.  The chirashi was different from other kinds of chirashi I've had before because all the fish was chopped up as opposed to being served in slices.  While I still prefer the sliced fish because you get to really taste the individual fishes, this version was still great and allowed for a lot of variety with each bite.  There was chopped up tuna, salmon, eel, sweet egg, salmon roe and white fish so it's possible to get about 2-3 different kinds of sushi in 1 bite.   Again the sushi rice was awesome and while I try to stay away from white rice these days, I started to just eat the rice on its own because it was that good. 

All in all, I really enjoyed my meal at Ootoya.  It would probably be more fun with more people so that you can try more things given the breadth of the menu.  Also everything here was very reasonably priced so I never felt like I was going to break the bank when I was considering ordering more food.  Another great sign to this place is that its full of Asians, which is usually a good sign of a quality Asian restaurant.  I mean there were probably only 2 tables in the whole place that wasn't occupied by a group of Asians.  Total bill: $67 for two with tax and tip.

Photo Credit: Yelp