Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Sushi By Bou brings chef-curated menu
A new sushi spot is coming to Broward County when Sushi By Bou Beach Club opens in April at the the Marriott Residence Inn Pompano Beach.
Presided over by Boca Raton native and sushi master David Bouhadana — hence the restaurant’s name — it is called omakase-style, a Japanese service that is more of a curated chef ’s choice than your more familiar a la carte way of ordering sushi.
The phrase can be interpreted as “I trust and leave it up to you,” and in this case means that the sushi chef prepares a guided multi-course meal of different sushi that has some sort of progression of flavors, with an emphasis on artistic presentation and seasonality.
“Omakase means trust me,” explains Bouhadana’s partner Michael Sinensky. “It doesn’t matter who you are … everyone wants to take a trip to Tokyo and have some of the freshest fish in the world. We try to make that happen, but in their neighborhood.”
A typical hour-long service might include an array of nigiri sushi such as bluefin tuna, marinated ikura (roe), uni (sea urchin roe), fatty tuna or perhaps a Hokkaido scallop topped with charcoal salt.
Of course there are some caveats.
“You come in and tell us about any allergies, or whether you want kosher style and don’t want, or maybe you’re just allergic to, shellfish,” Sinensky says. “But at the end of the day, the chef is the one who decides which way to go, based on your likes and dislikes.”
There is a more easy-going
izakaya menu as well, where the emphasis is on sushi and maki served in a more casual service along the lines of a gastropub or tapas bar. Izakaya translates to “sit and shop for sake.”
A 12-piece omakase meal is $50 per person. “And we have a Bou-Gie Package that doubles your time [to two hours] and you have more of a variety for $100,” says Sinensky.
The izakaya menu hasn’t been revealed, so we don’t have prices yet. However, according to the company’s website, the catering prices are $75 for eight rolls, $100 for 12 rolls and $125 for 16 rolls. A platter of 40 pieces of hand-molded nigiri sushi is $195.
There is also an in-house sake sommelier along with a mixologist making beachstyle cocktails, as opposed to Japanese traditional drinks found at other Sushi by Bou restaurants.
“We are playing toward the ocean,” says Sinensky
The look of Sushi by Bou
The omakase bar will be limited to 10 seats per hour.
For izakaya dining, there are an additional 40 seats indoors and 40 seats outdoors.
Hank Freid, the owner of Residence Inn at Marriott
Pompano Beach, says, “It’s not just the food, this is an experience. It’s very, very intimate [for omakase]. Or you can sit by the pool or by the beach or by the restaurant [for izakaya]. You know, sushi on the beach doesn’t happen too often.”
Freid is also the president and CEO of Impulsive Group, a hospitality company with a stable of boutique hotel and yacht charter companies. There are Sushi by Bou restaurants in New York, New Jersey, Chicago and Miami Beach (the former Versace Mansion).
Impulsive Group’s Sanctuary Hotel New York has the best-known Sushi by Bou location, which is more of a speakeasy. Not so with this latest venue in Pompano Beach.
“It’s a different environment walking into the restaurant,” Freid says. “You’re not going to feel like you’re in a Marriott hotel. The restaurant, it is very very cool looking with living walls. There is furniture from Bali, these tree trunk tables.”
Why Pompano Beach?
Sinensky says that they are eager to open a second South Florida restaurant.
“We are extremely excited and bullish about Florida,” he adds. “Coming from New York and seeing the difference on how
New York is doing with the economy renewal and how Florida is doing ... Florida is so alive.”
Freid says that in addition to the hospitality industry looking to expand outside of the Northeast, he has also seen a push toward Broward County from Miami-Dade.
“Pompano Beach is up and coming,” he says. “People are pushing north. We had purchased, about six or seven months ago, the Sand Harbor Resort and Marina on the Intracoastal.
This other property was like three minutes away. We are interested in going to places that have good bones, need good management and need a facelift. But I’ve seen shifting, even before COVID, to warmer climates.”
For his part, Sinensky adds that they do not focus their energies on patronage from the hotel guests, but rather the surrounding communities.
“When we choose a location for our concepts we look for locals, local
business people, local residents to be our main guests. That’s who we cater to. They are our gravy. I mean fish. And potatoes.”
If you go
Sushi by Bou Beach
Club will be located at 1350 Ocean Blvd. in Pompano Beach.
Reservations can be made on OpenTable
(not activated yet) or at SushiByBou.com.
Omakase dinner seatings at the restaurant sushi bar
are Mondays—Thursdays from 5-10 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays from 5 p.m.-midnight. Omakase lunch will be offered Saturdays and Sundays from noon-3 p.m.
The izakaya menu will be served Mondays— Thursdays from noon -10 p.m.; Fridays from noon11 p.m.; Saturdays from 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sundays from 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
For more information, you can also go to Facebook.com/sushibybou and Instagram.com/ sushibybou_/.
A year ago, all was well in Amanda Smeltz’s professional world.
She was the wine director at the Manhattan restaurants Estela and Altro Paradiso, where her selection of hard-to-find, often naturally produced wines was a major attraction. She put together the list, educated and oversaw a staff, and was part of the management team.
Everything changed with the pandemic, and her story is similar to those of many other sommeliers around the country. She has been furloughed, then rehired, twice as New York restaurants cycled through closings, reopenings and transitions to outdoor dining.
Perhaps most worrisome, she contracted COVID-19 in May, before many of the symptoms were understood. She lost her sense of smell and taste, alarming to anybody who depends on these for a living.
COVID-19 has posed daunting challenges for restaurants, which were ordered to close or operate at diminished capacity while still paying their rent, often with little governmental support. When the pandemic struck, wine was one of the few resources that could quickly be turned into cash.
Some restaurants converted themselves into retail operations, offering wine to go. Others, like Del Posto, in Chelsea, auctioned off significant portions of their rare and valuable wine collections to raise money.
The pandemic, along with national reckonings over racism and sexual harassment, have revealed dysfunctional, fragile businesses that largely depend on workers living paycheck to paycheck, sacrificing any semblance of the “worklife balance” that corporate
America professes to want for its employees.
Along with the hard questions that will have to be considered as the restaurant industry resurrects itself, it seems almost frivolous to ask: How will wine fit in when this is over?
During the last 35 years, I’ve watched wine evolve from largely an afterthought in American restaurants to a central component of both their ethos and their bottom line. In the early 1980s, only a handful of the fanciest French restaurants had what were once called “wine stewards.”
Sommeliers have since became restaurant fixtures, instrumental in building American wine culture and exposing consumers to new and wonderful styles and bottles. They’ve even become figures in popular culture and films. Yet sommelier culture has also
bred exploitive behavior and sexual harassment.
So, as restaurants reckon with their future, it’s worth exploring the role wine will take.
At Pinch Chinese in SoHo, once a bustling haven for wine lovers, wine director Miguel de Leon has overseen the restaurant’s conversion into a retail storefront, selling food and wine for takeout and delivery. The owners over the last year were to have opened two new restaurants, with de Leon as a partner, but those plans have been scrapped.
His wine list was rich with natural wines. At its peak, it had more than 300 selections. He said he is now down to about 60.
Just as he is appraising what Pinch will look like on the other side, de Leon is pondering what shape a more humane restaurant
model could take. Over the last year, he has thought deeply about the restaurant business, and has written passionately about how to diversify staffs and clientele, achieve more equitable pay and rectify the power dynamic that exists when servers depend on tips to make a living wage.
“We want to nourish people, we want to feed people. The fact that faces light up when they taste our food and drink our wines, that’s gratifying,” he said. “But there’s this notion that, ‘I’m paying for this, I should be able to do whatever I want.’ We want you to understand that you come first, but you’re not always right.”
When Etinosa Emokpae was hired in August 2019 as the sommelier at Friday Saturday Sunday, an intimate Philadelphia restaurant, she felt it was a dream
job, with the chance to create her own wine list.
When restaurants closed last March, she was furloughed with the expectation she’d be back at work by summer at the latest. Instead, she has been out of a job ever since. The restaurant reopened, but it could not afford to keep on managers like Emokpae.
She has been living on unemployment benefits, she said, with an occasional side job leading a private tasting. Yet as difficult as this year has been, she feels optimistic about the future for her and for wine.
Partly, she said, it’s because she has had time to reflect on what is most important to her, a luxury that was unavailable when she was working the 70- to 80-hour week that many restaurants demand. She has decided to look for a wine job somewhere other than restaurants.
The Black Lives Matter protests and the implosion of the Court of Master Sommeliers over sexual harassment by its leaders, she said, have led to far more openness and a greater sense of opportunity for people of all races and ethnicities.
“I already see the collaborations, the conversations, seeing this kind of explosion among people who didn’t feel like they had a place in the wine world, the way information is being shared,” Emokpae said of the conversations she is seeing online.
Matthew Conway has overseen the wine list at Marc Forgione, in Tribeca, since the restaurant opened in 2008, building it to almost 700 selections over the years, including many rare treasures from the Northern Rhône Valley of France. He also put together the list at Peasant, in Nolita, after Forgione bought the restaurant in late 2019. Conway is a partner in both restaurants, and handles much of the managerial work.
During the pandemic, he had to auction off half the collection at Marc Forgione. “It was painful, but it was necessary,” he said.
He believes this is a perfect time for restaurant leaders to reinvent the industry, making the sort of structural changes that would permit a more secure existence for workers. “We have operated for a long time with the complete understanding that the system was broken,” he said.
As for restaurant wine programs, he imagines that middle-tier places may gravitate toward smaller lists, but that high-end establishments will build back their inventory as soon as possible.
“There will always be rich people,” he said. “And rich people will always want to drink wine.”