FRESH FIND
Kai Sushi offers wide variety of Japanese delights
In search of sushi recently, I found it excellently at Kai Sushi. I took along a third-generation Japanese-American from Seattle, who pronounced Kai the kind of dime-a-dozen eatery you would find everywhere there, undistinguished in its cuisine and indifferently Asian in décor.
OK, that fits Kai Sushi in some respects. It’s in a shopping mall off St. Michael’s Drive, and it offers Japanese standards like katsu donburi, the equivalent of chicken-fried steak. But the sushi was first-rate, as even my snobbish guest had to admit.
He ordered one of the non-sushi lunches, a bento box with stir-fried beef and various trimmings ($11). He pronounced that ordinary, too, but I noticed that he gobbled up every scrap.
I thought it a nice lunch, and, as always, I admired the uniquely Japanese serving tray, with its little compartments for each and every thing. The stir-fried beef and onions were good, and the accompanying rice generous. The salad proved to be a nice toss of bibb lettuce and shredded vegetables in a rice vinaigrette. Other bento-box lunch combos include chicken katsu (chicken, chicken-fried), salmon and tempura, or tempura — deep-fried everything.
A couple of tempura-fried vegetables accompanied my guest’s lunch plus two pieces of sushi, which we thought at first were deep-fried too, but later wondered if were in fact baked. Whatever, they were delicious: crispy-crunchy and savory and dusted in sesame seeds.
I had come for sushi, and I was dazzled by the array on Kai’s menu. The choices range from various kinds of tuna, mackerel, crab, shrimp and eel. Quail eggs? Those are on the menu, too. The selection ranges in price, but $6 is pretty much the bottom line.
As for sashimi — basically raw fish, sans the rice accompaniment — that, too, is available, as is a whole menu of sushi rolls, ranging in price from $4 for a fish-less cucumber version to
$12. “Special” rolls are available, too, many including cream cheese. Having lived in Japan, I find the combination of dairy products and Japanese flavors incongruous and was somewhat gratified that my purist guest thought so, too. But I’d bet these Americanized versions are tasty nonetheless.
Choice was beyond me. So I went for broke, selecting the 7-by-7 combination of sushi and sashimi ($24). It was great! All the raw fish was immaculately fresh and nicely different in taste. The platter of fish and sushi rolls included a little mountain of wasabi horseradish, complete with its own scallion “palm tree” and plenty of pickled ginger.
I liked the sushi rolls well enough and appreciated the range of flavors, from yellow-fin tuna to salmon and mackerel. But the sashimi, cut in generous wedges, was out of this world. My guest snatched the yellow-fin, which he particularly likes. But he left me the rest, including what I decided was a raw scallop, a nice two mouthfuls, almost flavorless but buttery rich nonetheless.
This combo plate, it should be said, is more than generous enough for two as an appetizer. Paired with a house salad ($3) or an order of gyoza, the Japanese version of wonton ($5), as a starter, it’s enough as lunch for both.
Dessert at Kai Sushi amounts to ice cream or … ice cream. We declined, but luckily for us, they sent us a complimentary serving of mochi. Ice cream, yes: little balls of delicate green-tea flavored stuff, swathed in mochi. Mochi, I learned from my guest, is a type of rice that cooks into a kind of paste, flavored then, he said, with sugar and other things and served as a dessert around the new year. Or, alternatively, stirred into soup as a thickener.
Kai Sushi was relatively uncrowded during our weekday lunch but attracted a reasonable number of diners nonetheless. These diners — along with me — are onto something: Here is impeccable fish, at a reasonable price.