Berkeley restaurant offers modern Japanese flavors
To make fish cakes, Asuka Uchida forms black cod into spheres, stuffs them with cheese curds and drops them into a light beer batter. After a bath in hot oil, they emerge golden brown, bouncy and delicate. They also ooze cheese, an elegant take on comfort food.
On Tuesday, she and Yoshika Hedberg will open their first Japanese restaurant, Fish & Bird Sousaku Izakaya, in downtown Berkeley. Taking over the space of the former Middle Eastern restaurant Saha, they’ve refinished the tables, darkened the walls and brought in loads of Japanese ceramics.
“We wanted to do something no one is doing here: a modern style of Japanese cooking,” Hedberg said. “We don’t want to call it fusion. It’s something truly Japanese but with a flair of local flavors.”
Sousaku means “creative cuisine” in Japanese, and Hedberg described it as a genre of restaurants in Japan where raw fish is prepared with crudolike flourishes instead of the purity of sashimi, and French and Italian influences make their way into many dishes.
Japan has a history of taking foreign dishes and making them its own. Tonkatsu, for example, is a reformulation of schnitzel from Germany. This sensibility speaks to Fish & Bird’s vision, paired with the Bay Area tradition of using topnotch local, seasonal ingredients. The restaurant will source real wasabi — not the electric green powdered stuff found in many restaurants — from Sonoma County Wasabi in Santa Rosa and Japanese vegetables from Hikari Farms in Watsonville.
Those ingredients will contribute to dishes like chawan
mushi, the ethereal Japanese egg custard; thinly sliced duck tataki with black vinegar and a runny quail egg; a soulful nabe with Berkshire pork and mizuna; and a chrysanthemum greens salad with white anchovies. Hedberg expects most diners will spend $35 to $45 to split a few small plates.
As an izakaya, a Japanese bar serving small plates, Fish & Bird will emphasize drinks with an eye toward smaller, lessknown producers. It will be one of few Bay Area restaurants to serve Japanese wine alongside sake, shochu, Japanese beer and tea.
Uchida, who previously cooked at Spruce and Yuzuki Japanese Eatery in San Francisco, met Hedberg while working at BDama, Chikara Ono’s izakaya inside Swan’s Market in Oakland. They went on to work at Utzutzu, Ono’s tiny omakase restaurant in Alameda, and began talking about starting their own place. They brought on chef Shin Okamoto, also from BDama.
“I was really impressed with their craftsmanship,” Hedberg said of Uchida and Okamoto. “The concept evolved from there.”