Bush Garden

Today I was invited to join the MSG150 crew. I had seen that their previous post was Ocean City, and given that they have a planned out route, was hopeful that this would mean I would get to eat next door at Shanghai Garden. We used to call Shanghai Garden “chinese crack” because of our addiction to the hand shaved green noodles. But alas, when the call came in, it was a different garden that I got to eat at–Bush Garden. I arrived a bit ahead of the others and peeked into half of the dining room. Booths were so tall you couldn’t see over the top, allowing for the ultimate in privacy along one wall. The other half was an enormously long sushi bar. The size of the sushi bar gave me a little bit of hope in regards to the food.

Let me back up. Bush Garden is not a place where I had high expectations for the food. Mostly known for being a karaoke lounge, I was a little surprised it even bothered being open for lunch. In fact, there were quite a few people milling about and eating lunch. The entrance way has a small bamboo seating place and an indoor garden area that looks like it come out of a miniature golf course. We were taken back to the karaoke lounge area. I ordered, full of confidence from the size of the sushi bar, a sushi special.

For $6.95 I was served a miso soup, a small salad, 5 nigiri sushi and 2 hand rolls. That is dirt cheap, my friends. For $6.95 you get the pieces of square shaped half frozen tuna maki at the grocery store. And this was definitely better than store sushi. It was clearly made on the spot, the rice was made that day, though not too recently. The fish quality was definitely not top notch. It was cut into odd shapes and was slightly grainy. It tasted fresh though, not old, and they did not skimp on it. My 5 nigiri were ahi and albacore tuna, salmon, shrimp and a white fish that I didn’t identify and can’t remember. One hand roll was cucumber and the other was spicy tuna, a favorite of mine.

Overall, I have to admit I was pretty impressed at the amount and quality of sushi I got for 6.95, though I’m not sure I wouldn’t just rather get cheap food elsewhere and save sushi for the splurges!

 

Omakase Life (4/25/07)

Recently my roommate and I, sushi afficionado extraordinaires, discovered the magic word ‘Omakase’. Essentially it means that you would like the chef to give you whatever is best that day. Having just enjoyed a delicious and unique meal at Shun, near U. Village (full omakase reviews after the break), I got to thinking about using the term omakase in other fields. When we sit down at the sushi bar and say ‘omakase’ the chef relishes his (or her?) chance to show off just how well they can do while at the same time you get to enjoy the fruit of his labor. It isn’t that the sushi is not always amazing (it is) or that he doesn’t normally try (he clearly does), its just that somewhere in there, he has the extra trick up his sleeve, just waiting to be asked for. So I got to thinking about the use of this word in the rest of the world: What if I sat down in front of Ichiro and said that word. Would fancy bat work and trick dance steps down the baselines come out? Would the M’s start winning? Or say I said it to Mayor Nickels. Could we solve the tunnel/viaduct problem if we just asked someone to omakase it?
The intro to omakase came at Umi Sake House in Belltown. They have it priced and on the menu, so you can order it to your table. You also have the option of sushi or sashimi. Both times I ordered the $25 Sashimi plate and it came out different each time, filled with variety, each piece perfectly cut and introduced me to stuff I would never have ordered. The highlight included the three different types salmon on one of them and the king crab on the other. This is a great place to start your omakase journey.

The second place we tried is our local neighborhood joint that we love dearly. Shun (pronounced shoon), is just north of U Village. I was inclined to dislike it, as I was a huge fan of Thai Dusit, the thai restaurant it replaced, but it is hard to dislike a cheap, terrific sushi restaurant within 2 miles of your house. So we sat at the sushi bar and nervously eeked out the magic word. The chef grinned, asked us if there was anything we didn’t eat (hell no!) and got started. A seaweed and king crab salad started us off, followed by a variety of nigiri, monkfish liver in ponzu sauce, deep fried mackerel bones, and more nigiri. Everything was delicious and new to us. Those items that were not new to us had something different about them. The unagi, not something I normally like, melted off our tongues like butter. This was truly an enlightening sushi experience. As the bill came, we braced for the worst. And boy were we shocked when we saw the price–Just $30 each for this feast of chef specialities.

Drunk on our amazing omakase eating skills, we decided to go straight for the top: Shiro’s. I had heard from multiple sources that this was the place to get the best sushi in town. We got there at 5:30, right when it opened to be assured a spot at the sushi bar. We sat down, told the chef in front of us our order and tittered excitedly. The first piece of nigiri dropped in front of us. We chewed thoughtfully. It was, well, fishy. But we said nothing. Piece after undistinguished piece of nigiri dropped in front of us, and each one was fishy, not fresh and exciting, but like he was rushing us away. There was only one non-nigiri item, and that was the tuna handroll. Good, but not great. At the end, the other chef was making an amazing looking poke, and after looking longingly, he offered us a sample. Even that looked better than it tasted. There was a highlight at Shiro’s though, which was that we watched them kill our shrimp and lay them out on our nigiri. And I of course, love the deep fried shrimp head. My roommate let me eat hers. This time we were ready for the bill. Confident in our omakase experience, we were sure we would pay for what we got, which wasn’t worth a whole lot. Shortly, however, we were jarred back to reality, as the cost was $113 for the two of us. Heads hung in shame, we left, broke and unsatisfied.

I hope this helps everyone else discovery the wonderful world of omakase that this fine city has to offer. And maybe even get the word Omakase into our daily language.

Umi Sake House

I had previously only been to Umi for happy hour and thus my only memory was fuzzily searching for the bathroom, which is camoflouged into a wooden wall and not ideal for those of us who have had too much cheap sake.
But this time we had missed Happy Hour (which runs til 8, so you must be very flaky to miss). So we had a look at the extensive fresh sheet and the two enormous pages of menu items.

I started with the oyster shooter. Each of the components–a sorbet, the oyster, and the salsa type veggies on the bottome–were delicious, but I very much like my oyster and found it very overwhelming to have all that going on.
I had a similar experience with the 007 Roll, which we tried later in the meal. I loved the concept of jalepeno and cilantro on a roll–it reminded me of Bahn Mi, but the lime slices were very overpowering. By removing them from the roll, just a hint of the lime remained and I found that much tastier. It was also a little unwieldy having everything (salmon, jalepeno, cilantro, lime) on top of the roll, since they didn’t really mold into the rice, so it was difficult to eat. However, the flavors were extremely inventive and I like that they are able to do new american style sushi in such original ways.

They are also capable of traditional sashimi just the way I like it. We ordered the smallest of the sashimi omakase’s ($25). We were brought a huge platter of a multitude of different kinds of fish, including multiple salmon, many fish I couldn’t name off the top of my head. Each and every one was delicious and well cut. I even ate the surf clam, which is not normally a favorite of mine. I wish I could remember what they all were so I can order them individually at places with out such an incredibly good deal!

We also had two other appetizers, the rainbow tartare and the king crab tower. They were eerily similar for being to such different things. Both came like a chirashi bowl, with avocado and rice. They both were nearly drowned in a wasabi mayo sauce as well. The rainbow had great fish and I loved the crab meat, but like the oyster and the 007, I felt that they didn’t leave the tasty and amazing fish they served to speak for itself. Sometimes simple is better.

Even so, I would return for another Omakase, and maybe a few other things too, I just know now to stick to the simple pleasures of raw fish.

I Love Sushi

So after having convinced the Man that I Love Sushi deserved a second try (he had been there, I had not, but had heard great things about it), we headed down for an early dinner. It was expensive (80 for the two of us), but you got what you paid for. The service was excellent (the B did not like that the waitress moved his beer when she put down the food) and I got to try things I don’t normally order at sushi places.

We started with a special: salmon wrapped oysters. While I was almost insulted when the waitress asked us “you know its raw, right” I held my tongue. And what came out was 4 beautifully presented raw oysters, on shells, wrapped in two different kinds of delicious salmon sashimi, all drizzled with just a hint of ponzu sauce. I could eat these things all day. I had already been won over.

Next up was the Seafood Poki. I had never seen it spelled that way, but ordered it anyways. It was delicious, the fish all cut up small and well dressed. I could have used a bit more spice, but I happen to like my poke to burn. The cucmber mixed in well with the size of fish slices, and I even enjoyed the tako (octopus) which I often find to be too rubbery for my taste in sashimi or sushi form.

We had a rainbow roll, which was good, though other than being enormous, did little to set itself apart from the average rainbow roll. Similarly the spicy tuna roll was the mashed up kind with the sauce mixed in, as oppose to a whole chunk of tuna with sauce on it, though that might just be a personal preference.

We finished up with a salmon skin hand roll with spicy sauce. B enjoyed that they left some meat on the salmon skin, though I thought that just highlighted the fact that the roll lacked the crunch I enjoy in the skin. The spicy sauce was a little different, it kind of reminded me of siracha in taste, but it did get my mouth burning, so I was okay with it.

Overall I enjoyed to experience, but I would stick to the inventive and interesting dishes rather than pay a lot for pretty good sushi.

Shun

So this will actually be an amalgam of my many times at Shun, a Sushi place outside of University Village.

I started out with a vendetta against Shun. While in previous incarnations the building has been a KFC and a freaky vegan cafe, its most recent incarnation was as my family’s go-to thai restaurant, Thai Dusit. Furthermore, my first visit my food was forgotten. We went, we ordered, everyone at my table got their food. I asked repeatedly for my food, my family finished theirs, mine still was not there. I left hungry, bitter, and nostalgic for Thai Dusit, who had never, in all my many visits, left me unfed.

My parents, despite my bitterness toward the restaurant, returned without me. They told me it was actually pretty good, and it seemed to have gotten over its opening jitters. So I went back. And what a pleasent surprise.

Every time I am in Shun, I am served up beautiful, fresh, well cut plates of sashimi. The rice is a good texture on the nigiri, and they make a delicious and slightly more original seaweed salad than you see in your run of the mill sushi place. It is a great place to get what you want and keep the price down–you can get out of there with seaweed salad, sashimi, sushi, nigiri and sake for under $25 a person no problem.

In terms of service, I have to mention that on Valentine’s Day, with no reservation anywhere, we were able to fight our way through the crowd at the door, and be seated with in ten minutes. How many other places can do that?

My only issue I have ever had with the food would be that I was once served a piece of geoduck that maybe sat a little bit too long. But when you consider how often I eat there, only one bad piece of fish–and it wasn’t awful, just not perfect, I can’t complain.

Sam’s Sushi

So I have been to Sam’s before and have always enjoyed decent, even good, cheap sushi there. We went for the BF’s B-day, though and I was thoughroly dissapointed. Our sashimi was frozen. I could see the ice crystals in my fish. We pointed this out to the waitress, who took the fish back, switched that one fish out, and gave us a different kind. Not more, not switching out other types of fish (which were also frozen) but simply the one piece I had pointed out. She was also unapologetic. When you consider it was a birthday dinner, and we were spending over $100 for a two top, which I’m guessing doesn’t happen all that much there, you would think she could knock off a beer, or discount our sashimi or something. Nope. We paid a lot of money for frozen sashimi. Well. Guess I won’t go back there any time soon!

Rain Modern Japanese Cuisine

I live in fear of eating bad sushi, and luckily there was none to be had yesterday when I gave Rain’s happy hour a try. However, good sushi with bad service leaves much to be desired as well. When we sat down we were given a small bowl of edamame, and I’ll be honest, I have to say I love when the restaurant gives me something to munch on while I make my decisions. We ordered 2 large house sakes ($4 a piece, not bad at all) and a Jenny’s roll. The Jennys roll (scallops, avacado, salmon, wasabi sauce) was very good. It was a filling roll, and it came cut into 8 very large slices. The two handrolls we ordered came out wrong–one negihama and one salmon skin suddenly became 2 negihama. Once that was straightened out, I have to say I did not like the style their handrolls cam in. Instead of being rolled simliar to a regular roll, they were rolled like an ice cream cone–a cone of nori, with rice in the bottom and a chopped mix on top. I liked the mix in the salmon skin (why I had ordered it in the first place, and not 2 of the negihama). I was not overly pleased with the negihama–a mix of tuna and scallions and herbs. I felt that the flavors overwhelmed the taste of the fish, but my partner in crime liked it a lot.
We both ordered ourselves the Sashimi plate ($ which was an amazing amount of raw fish for such a price (I love happy hour). The fish was quite good, and generally very well cut. There were some odd pieces of tuna chunk there, but it all tasted just right, so I was pretty happy.
So the service…Besides our screwed up handroll, he also asked if we had anything else coming out (clearly having forgotten our 2 sashimi plates), then told me the hand roll would be on the house and proceeded to charge me for all three handrolls. However, he forgot to charge me for one of the sakes and when asked removed the handroll. Somehow we also lost a sashimi plate in all this. So if you are willing to endure the terrible service to get cheap sushi, here is the place!