San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
3 new Asian restaurants to savor
Powerhouse Cambodian cuisine, great sushi, steamy ramen on their menus
Susan Kaars-Sypesteyn compares nom banh chok at her Golden Wat Noodle House to the comforts of chicken noodle soup. The Cambodian soup she calls Mekong Magic incorporates noodles and chicken, of course, but also lemongrass curry, fish and ginger paste.
It’s chicken soup for a more complicated time, reflecting the challenges of opening a new restaurant as the pandemic spiked. When Golden Wat started in August just off the St. Mary’s Strip, it was a ghost kitchen offering only takeout and delivery out of Cookhouse Restaurant, the New Orleans favorite she co-owned with her husband, chef Pieter Sypesteyn.
Golden Wat gathered so much early momentum that it needed a home of its own. And so in a bittersweet game of musical chairs, Golden Wat moved into the cottage home of the couple’s NOLA Brunch & Beignets in February, while NOLA moved into the Cookhouse space.
With nowhere to call home, Cookhouse called it a day and bowed out. A time for comfort food, to be sure.
Golden Wat joins two other newcomers to San Antonio’s Asian restaurant scene. Shiro Japanese Sushi Bistro opened across from the San Antonio Museum of Art about the same time as Golden Wat’s ghost kitchen launch, and Yokai Ramen followed on the Northeast Side in December.
All three have stood up to the turmoil of a pandemic and its uncertainties, and all three are worth a deeper look.
Golden Wat Noodle House
Bringing Cambodian food to a wider audience wasn’t much of a stretch for Kaars-Sypesteyn. She and her husband channel New Orleans in public, but at home with their four kids, they cook the food of her Cambodian heritage. Golden Wat must be what it’s like eating at their table.
The space, a bungalow warren of small dining rooms with a patio that spills onto the sidewalk, is painted a yellow that looks like milk accented with turmeric, the same warming spice that goes into sweet and dense Cambodian doughnuts called nom kong ($2 each), along with strawberry and matcha tea varieties.
The food takes familiar forms, from the wide noodles of a beef stir-fry called mee kan tang ($15) to steamed rice in a bowl with braised pork called kaw sach chrouk ($14). But the flavors take you to new places, like the caramelized palm sugar in the pork and the deep salty umami jolt of the noodles.
Somlaw machu kroeung ($17) will ring recognizable notes for San Antonio fans of menudo, but the beef and beef tripe create their own identity with lemongrass and Thai eggplant. And that chicken noodle soup? Let’s just say that ginger, fish and aromatic herbs make Mekong Magic ($12) a chicken soup for the soul who wants more than just broth and noodles.
111 Kings Court, 210-320-8211, goldenwatnoodlehouse.com.
Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Dine-in, curbside and third-party delivery available.
Shiro Japanese Sushi Bistro
I get asked all the time where to go for sushi in San Antonio. Shiro near the San Antonio Museum of Art is shaping up to be my new answer.
Shiro is a California export, coming from a family of Sky Sushi restaurants in that state. But San Antonio is a new branch of that family tree. It’s sleek, small and loud, with pop music bouncing off the concrete, glass and unfinished ceiling. It’s anchored by a sushi bar with chefs bent over in their work.
And it’s good work. The best of it is done simply, especially a nigiri sampler ($48) that brought a chef ’s choice of seven pieces of fish over properly vinegared sushi rice, each piece
silky and fresh, including akami tuna, hamachi, salmon, otoro tuna, horse mackerel, shima aji and cherry salmon.
Shiro has a long list of sushi rolls, along with cold creations like truffle hamachi ($20), a canvas of lush yellowtail fish with ornaments of shaved truffle and edible flowers for an experience that painted visual and flavor experiences with
equal power.
Individual sashimi and sushi options include sea urchin ($12) so fresh it could have come from the pier where it was harvested and velveteen slices of marbled Australian Wagyu beef ($8), brought to the table with a hot charcoal grill for searing the meat tableside.
With a River Walk view and a cold Japanese beer or a glass of
Champagne, Shiro is a cool California taste of the sushi life.
107 W. Jones Ave., Facebook: @shirosanantonio. Open 4 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 4 to 11 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 4 to 9 p.m. Sunday. Dine-in and takeout available.
Yokai Japanese & Asian Restaurant
Yokai chef and manager Des Ito believes in getting ramen from the kitchen to the customer in less than a minute to maximize its steam, texture and flavor. So he pushes bowls through a sliding window at the service counter the second they’re ready, and what arrives at the table feels like winning an arcade game, a feeling punctuated by video-game music pulsing through the air.
Yokai comes straight from the Yokai Japanese restaurant group. And while its home base might be in Japan, its heart makes room for San Antonio.
“San Antonio is a very beautiful city,” a spokesperson said. “The people are nice. We like H-E-B and Whataburger. We chose to invest here.”
Yokai, at Thousand Oaks and Jones Maltsberger, specializes in ramen, and it makes a strong statement with pork tonkotsu ($12.50) that shimmers in a silky broth with curly blond noodles, corn, mushrooms and a marinated ajitama egg. On the lighter side, Yokai makes a clean, clear shio broth for chicken ramen ($11.99).
Along with ramen, Yokai makes Japanese fried rice with a tight, grainy texture and deep umami flavor, with protein choices that include curls of pearled white shrimp ($10.99).
2923 Thousand Oaks Drive, Suite 5, 210-672-8259, yokaieat.com. Open 11:30 a.m. to 8:15 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 11:30 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Dine-in, takeout and third-party delivery available.