I had been wanting to try this place for a while, so when VA wanted to take me somewhere for my b-day, I had to jump on the sushi band wagon because it's been a while since I've been to a proper sushi place and I knew she would also really appreciate it. We didn't have reservations, but we were there on random Tuesday night around 7pm. The host told us that she would need the table back at 8:30pm, which was fine. The decor here is simple and clean; it's one floor below ground level and it's basically a small room with a sushi bar and several tables. It wasn't exactly no frills, but there were very few frills. The menu is classic Japanese - you won't find any crazy rolls with mango or cream cheese or other things I never understood why people wanted with their raw fish. We started with the miso black cod to share and then also shared the fatty tuna and scallion roll, amberjack and scallion roll, and spicy tuna roll. VA got the softshell crab for an entree and I got the nigiri entree. Even though we told the waitress that we wanted to share the black cod to start and that VA would have the softshell crab as an entree the softshell crab still came out first along with my garden salad. No biggie, but it's the small things like this that eat away at a 5 fork rating. I didn't try the softshell crab but it looked great. The garden salad was nice in that it had some mixed greens in there and wasn't your usual bowl of iceberg lettuce that you usually get with a garden salad in sushi places. The only thing was that it didn't come with the delicious ginger carrot dressing I usually love with sushi garden salads, instead it was a regular kind of balsamic type dressing. I mean I'm not complaining about it, but ginger dressing is damn good and you rarely get it outside of a sushi joint.
Then we waited and waited a bit and after a while our black cod finally came out. Oh my gosh, it was literally melting in my mouth. So incredibly soft and flaky with that delicious miso glaze on top of it. Since it was an appetizer, there wasn't much of it but we polished that dish off fairly quickly. Then we waited and waited again. I understand that it was busy but given that we were under a somewhat short timeframe, it would have been nice if our food didn't take such a long time. But again, when the sushi came out, it was totally worth the wait. They brought out the spicy tuna and fatty tuna with scallion roll and the 1st part of my nigiri sushi which had salmon, medium fatty tuna, spot shrimp, fluke, and a soy cured tuna - the waitress told me not to put the 3 last in soy sauce (which I of course totally forgot to do). The quality of the fish was simply amazing. It tasted just like it had some straight out of the water or from one of the sushi bars I ate at in Tokyo by the fish market. Simply perfection. If you think you had good sushi before, I urge you to try the fish here and compare. For me, even if there's a fish that I don't love (I'm looking at you Spanish Mackerel), but if it's incredibly fresh, I will manage to still like it because of its high quality. Since our table was pretty small, we had to finish a few things before they could bring the amberjack and scallion roll and the 2nd part of my nigiri which was an egg custard, uni, salmon roe, eel and a half roll of tuna and scallion. Again, delicious and amazing. The uni was soft and creamy and the roe was nice and salty. While it didn't feel like I ate a ton of food, I was pretty full at the end of our meal and when we asked for the check we looked at our watch and it was 8:28pm, perfect timing! But then as we were literally signing the check the hostess comes over and says "Excuse me, but I need your table at 8:30. Are you done eating?". Now one of my biggest pet peeves ever in the restaurant world is when a host gives you a table knowing that there is a reservation right after it and then bugging you to leave your table. I don't mind being told in the beginning that someone has our table and I try to be very conscious about it because I know what it feels like to make a reservation and then have to wait for it, but we were literally signing the check. It just felt like in bad taste. If that hadn't happened, I probably could have written off the long wait in between dishes and given this place 5 forks, but the service in the end added up and I had to knock half a fork. But please don't let that stop you from giving this place your full attention. Total bill: I'm not really sure since it was VA's treat but I think it was around $90 without tip - which is a pretty reasonable meal for high end sushi.
Photo Credit: Yelp
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