My mom’s a weird lady. Her tastes are as fickle as the current economy and her restaurant standards are higher than Jonathan Gold’s. When it comes to sushi, she only trusts one establishment in Chicago to get her toro right, and if I try to drag her anywhere else, you don’t even want to see the face I get.
Throngs of sushi aficionados these days think the mark of a good chef is wit or innovation. While these aren’t ordinarily regarded as negative traits, they tend to fog what really matters when ingesting raw fish—the fish. Bizarre concept, I know, but one we all seem to have forgotten amidst the cream cheese and fried nonsense sticking out of our hand rolls. With the right amount of American-themed ingredients and copious loads of eel sauce, pretty much any newcomer can be labeled “the best sushi in town.”
Maybe it was growing up with mama bear, but that just isn’t a phrase I throw around lightly. So when she visited me and suggested Japon Bistro, my nerves were on edge. It didn’t help that this place, which she’d read about in the hotel restaurant guide, was in Pasadena—a festival of fusion and carnival of clever that is also unfortunately a Mecca for mediocrity and often a barren wasteland of fine dining.
I feel the need to offer a disclaimer here—I hate on Pasadena a lot, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t discovered my fair share of hidden gems there. In fact, the patrons are often more bothersome than the food. Be that as it may, the boxes lining Colorado Boulevard bear closer resemblance to factories than places to dine, and I usually enter into contracts with our neighboring chefs to the east with a teensy modicum of trepidation.
Where was I? Oh yes, escorting my mother and all her sushi-snob baggage to a Japanese restaurant on Colorado Boulevard. So help me god.
We were the only non-Japanese folks in the place at first, which I took as a very good sign. The printed special rolls menu was two pages long and included a few efforts to pique our Western interest—the southwestern-themed roll didn’t look half bad, with cilantro and jalapenos, but we were distracted by the rice-free concoctions, one wrapped in brown rice paper and filled with asparagus, real crab, salmon, tuna, cucumber and yellowtail and another wrapped in cucumber and filled with tuna, salmon, avocado and yellowtail. While slightly inventive, they were filled with fish and we considered them a viable way to test this place’s marine quality might. These were not the only specials—we were also presented with a dry erase board boasting more catches-of-the-day than one could feasibly catch in a day, and I don’t think we ever even opened our ordinary menus. Our extremely knowledgeable waiter described new appetizers and dishes and fielded all of my mom’s questions like a pro. She practically swooned when he described their ikura, salmon roe in a seaweed shell that I usually avoid because of how fishy it smells. Apparently, Japon Bistro is a rare find in that they have fresh ikura, not the canned kind even the classiest sushi joints employ. And I actually liked it!
Another mama bear staple order is toro, or fatty tuna, a cut of tuna from a fish so large and difficult to catch that it’s often the most expensive thing on the menu. Everywhere you go, it’s served at a fluctuating market price and extremely fluctuating quality. Japon Bistro’s was silky, creamy and perfectly pink, lavishly draped in significant portions across the cubes of rice.
The quality of the fish inside the rolls was just as good, rendering the soy sauce on our table kind of a moot point. We got a few orders of sea bream, a white fish they had soaked in lime juice before preparing the nigiri. They also introduced me to a new-found love of unagi and it was hard not to get ten more orders after dipping a toe in that stuff.
All the rolls came with seaweed salad, which would have been good to know before we ordered one for ourselves. Their concoction contained not one, not two, but three types of seaweed. Unlike the usual slippery green mess, the contents of this bowl were divided neatly into three piles, one green, one purple and one white, each with a distinct flavor but all brought together by the bittersweet wonder that is vinegar. This hardly warranted a dessert, but I ordered plum wine nonetheless. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even finish the stuff without multiple spontaneous cavities popping up—alas, I should have partaken in their autumn harvest sake sampler instead. It was hard to be disappointed after a meal like that, though. Especially when, on the car ride back to the hotel, my mom uttered the following statement: “I think that’s the best sushi I’ve ever had.”
For more information, visit http://www.japonbistro-pasadena.com
No comments:
Post a Comment