Like I love sushi…
Okay, those weren’t the exact lyrics sung by Eddie Cantor but we’ve been on a
recent sushi binge the past couple of
months. Usually we simply would make a trek to the airport industrial area
every 4 to 6 months to Mitch’s Fish Market and Sushi Bar partly because of the
extremely fresh seafood, partly because of the BYOB policy which is always great
for wine and sake toting patrons like
us. If you aren’t aware of the story of Mitch’s, basically Craig Mitchell who
originally hailed from South Africa travelled the globe eventually settling in
the 50th to work at a seafood distribution company which he
eventually purchased. After his parents retired, they also decided to settle in
the 50th but Craig’s father Mitch eventually experienced retirement
boredom so Craig started a small 14 seat sushi
bar for Dad to run which eventually expanded to its current size as a full
sized sushi restaurant complete with
two sushi counters. And since that
original visit years ago, Mitch’s has always been our go to restaurant for sushi. That is until we were bitten by
the sushi bug and developed sushi-itis.
Vintage Cave
I previously described our superlative meal at Vintage
Cave Café located adjacent to the Shirokiya Japan Village Walk last year during
their promotion which offered 50% off most menu selections during a one week
promotion period. Well, their upscale sister restaurant Vintage Cave felt that
most residents weren’t aware that the flagship restaurant that started it all
was also still open for business. After all, after opening Chef Chris Kajioka
then subsequent Chef Jonathan Mizukami both left Vintage Cave, most local
diners assumed that it simply closed or at least remained just a
membership-only venue. Well, the current management of Vintage Cave also
assumed the same so they offered a 50% off promotion for both their
French-Japanese kaiseki and Sushi kaiseki omakase dinners
through the month of October. Both dinners were reduced from the usual $300 per
person to $150 per person. Since both Sushi Sho and Sushi Maru charge about
$300 per person, I thought that Vintage Cave’s offer was reasonable especially
since owner Takeshi Sekiguchi’s philosophy has been simply to purchase the best
product with cost an afterthought.
So we booked two of the six nightly seats available at
the end of September and were pleasantly surprised at the meal which included
both traditional and non-traditional Japanese dishes including the first dish,
caviar served atop saikyo white miso marinated cream cheese. The balance
of the rich cream cheese and salty, sweet miso
was so good, I started marinating cream cheese in miso at home to pair with cold smoked salmon. Several traditional
Japanese course were then served including sweet raw shrimp, uni and lighter fleshed sashimi but the next epiphany wasn’t an
actual course but the pickles used to garnish each dish. Instead of the
traditional light pink beni shoga
accompaniment, we were served smoked daikon
that Chef Benkei obtained from a village in Japan. They still had a slight
crunch like traditional Japanese takuan
and were drier than the locally produced wet takuan but they only had a slight pickled quality. Chef Benkei
explained that the daikon were hung
over slowly burning embers for weeks or months – I also tried recreating this
in my own kitchen (though I don’t have the traditional Japanese cooking hearth)
using Japanese takuan in my own
bullet smoker. Nope, not the same though I’ll continue to try and recreate that
smoked daikon. It was at the halfway
point of our meal that Chef Benkei revealed that he previously owned and
operated Sushi Bistro Shun for about 15 years and only closed operations due to
the sale of the building. His “okasan”
who worked with him at Sushi Bistro Shun wasn’t interested in starting from
scratch so he jumped at the opportunity at Vintage Cave when it was offered. He
also confided that with just 6 diners per evening, he enjoyed speaking with
diners as Sushi Bistro Shun had 14 counter seats so he never got the chance to
really converse with diners.
After the halfway point, the darker fleshed fish made
their entrance including the fattiest chu-toro
(medium fatty tuna) I’ve ever seen – even Chef Benkei remarked that it was
closer to o-toro than chu-toro. Another epiphany was the
rolled sardine sushi. Lightly salted
sardine filets were rolled around a scant bit of sushi rice then rolled in nori
– the flavor was out of this world. I almost asked for a second serving but my
better judgement overruled my initial thoughts. Several cooked dishes followed
ending with miso soup and matcha tea whisked by Chef Benkei. The
only let down for the whole meal was the musk melon served at the very end.
These are the $100-plus musk melons grown in Japan but if I weren’t informed of
their origin (and cost), I simply would have thought they were simple
supermarket melons that were ripe. So would I return? For 50% off, YES! But for
the actual $300 cost, I’d probably first sample either Sushi Sho or Sushi Maru.
Sushi Murayama
At the beginning of our stay-cay in November, we booked
two seats at Sushi Murayama. It’s in the 808 Center adjacent to the HMSA
Building and kitty corner to the parking structure of Walmart/Sam’s Club. It
also happens to be next to the Mrs’ hair stylist at DADA Salon though you would
never know as there’s no signage about the front door. Two omakase meals are offered at $75 and $138 (along with ala carte
dishes) with the higher priced meal including the lobster, o-toro and wagyu musubi and believe me, are well worth
the additional cost.
The meal started with the negi-toro or scraped bits of fatty tuna from the skin and bones but
instead of a simple rolled sushi, was
the size of a large musubi with
crunchy fried garlic chips, sprouts and other garnishes. Next up was the
largest oyster I’ve ever sampled on the half shell and unlike those large
Pacific oysters sold at the supermarket, these were as flavorful as any oysters
on the half shell… just 5 to 10 times as large. Chef Ryuji explained that he
never purchases these oyster from the Northwest during the summer as their
creaminess overwhelms most diners due to their size. If he has to purchase
them, he simply serves the outer body to diners and consumes the creamy center
as his snack. He stated that they’ll continue to get better as winter
approaches… sounds like another visit is in order. We then were served two of
my favorite seafood, sake (salmon)
and geoduck clam. The salmon piece was so large it looked more like something
to grill than place atop sushi rice. And because it was Ora King salmon, it was
as rich and buttery as salmon gets. I’m not sure if it’s due to global warming
but geoduck clam isn’t as readily available as it was 5 to 10 years ago.
Marukai used to sell strips for sashimi but stopped years ago and it’s not
always on sushi menus usually offered more as a special than a regular menu
item and these were as good as it gets with that nice crunchy texture and
tasting of sweetened sea water with that subtle clam flavor.
Sushi Murayama
also makes their own pickled ginger apparently with very younger ginger
rhizomes as the whole pieces are mostly “pinkie” sized and the Mrs couldn’t
stop devouring them between courses. Chef Ryuji also served a rolled saba sushi
but his rendition was rolled in konbu
and again, I almost asked for a 2nd serving. As the o-toro was served, the Mrs started
reaching her limits (probably due to our Greek lunch earlier in the day) so I
valiantly consumed the rest of her o-toro
topped with uni and Tristan lobster sashimi which was very lightly broiled
to char it ever so lightly. Then the last piece
de resistance was served, the wagyu
musubi.
Lightly torched wagyu covered rice on toasted nori. Very
rich but also very tender – the Mrs had to box her musubi at this point - and the perfect ending to the meal… or so I
thought. When Chef Ryuji described the desserts, I was about to pass as I was
also quite sated but when he mentioned the vanilla gelato with whisky… A
solitary scoop of vanilla gelato topped with a shot of Yamazaki 12 year old whisky.
The creamy, richness of the gelato toned down the alcohol burn and was balanced
by the earthiness of the whisky while the flavors in the whisky cut through the
mouth coating gelato. Perfection in a simple dessert that I’ll replicate at
home. And all for $138 plus $24 for the whisky gelato. In the words of the
Terminator, “we’ll be back”…
Sushi Murayama
808 Sheridan St #307 (behind the black glass door)
Honolulu, HI 96814
(808) 784-2100
Lunch: Tue-Sat
11:00am to 2:00pm
Dinner: Mon-Thu
5:30pm to 10:30pm
Fri-Sat
5:30pm to 11:30pm
Sun
5:00pm to 9:30pm
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