Sushi, Big-Time
Shiki's decor and furnishings were nothing to write home about (an ad placed by the restaurant since my first visit proclaimed that they had just completed a renovation, but as of a few days ago it was hard to tell the difference). The chairs were cushioned, steel-frame jobs, kind of like what you might find in your better Florida retirement-home bingo hall, the sort of place where the residents are savvy enough to punch a butterfly ballot correctly, but with Oriental prints laminated onto them. The walls had similar artwork, which my friend described as "the same stuff I've seen in every strip mall Asian restaurant I've ever been to in my life." But the patrons, a mix of everyone from downtown hipster types to a pair of thirtysomething moms complaining about how Tom & Jerry and Pokemon make their sons "too hyped up and violent" (I pity those soon-to-be-Ritalined boys), didn't seem to care. They were there for the food, and so were we.
?
The first time we went, although the house was more than half full, we were greeted by a Japanese woman who was about as friendly and solicitous as a hostess can be, thrilled to see us enter and sorry to see us go.
On my second visit, I was the first in my party to arrive. A Caucasian man, presumably the woman's husband, was there to welcome me, and brought me a hot bowl of miso soup as soon as I sat down. To order our fish, we were given slips of paper on which to tick off the number of pieces of each type we wanted?though warnings in the menu cautioned us to eat all our rice, and that we would be billed at the a la carte price for anything we didn't finish. (Back at the sushi place in Arlington, the management had similar restrictions in place. My dining companions then simply "accidentally" dropped their rice into their laps to save room in their stomachs for the fish. Of course, they had to smuggle cantaloupe-sized balls of rice out under their coats.)
The selections on the menu were basic?fluke, tuna, yellowtail, eel, salmon and the like, along with a standard assortment of rolls?but, when served, the fish proved to be pretty good. The slices of fish were reasonably generous size-wise, considering the deal, and some items, such as the salmon, proved to be quite good. Other, less prosaic items could be ordered for an extra fee, though a pair of pieces of sea urchin I ordered last time didn't taste all that fresh and didn't have that wonderful creamy texture I love so much. (One can't imagine there's a lot of turnover on items that aren't part of "the deal.") But a giant clam, offered as part of the deal under a "catch of the day" heading, proved very tasty.
Sure, all you can eat sushi is simply the logical continuation of the trend toward gigantism in Japanese food in America, exploding it out of its austere, delicate traditions. While we were working, until recently, in the West Village, my aforementioned coworkers and I ate regularly at Yama on Carmine St. (they have two other locations). There, the fish is not exactly cheap?nor is it small or anything less than delicious. Veritable slabs of the stuff, up to 5 inches long, flop over the rice, and it takes some effort to get it all into your mouth in one piece. But every piece is excellent, and the stock clearly never sits around for more than 24 hours. Furthermore, more exotic items like sea urchin with quail egg or salmon roe come in heaping mounds spilling out of their nori seaweed shells, and with just a quick swipe through the soy, one's mouth is filled with an incredible explosion of taste and texture.
Some have criticized this trend, saying that oversized sushi of the kind served at Yama or the sort of specials offered by Shiki's is wrong, that it takes away from the Japanese essence of the cuisine, that it is somehow a perversion of something right and proper by American tastes, which demand that everything be done big. The New York Times' Eric Asimov took a shot at the trend in a recent column, noting that "Italians snicker at how Americans demand more sauce than pasta, just as Chinese laugh at how Americans order one huge dish per person and skimp on the rice that is actually the basis of the cuisine. Clearly, Americans are having sushi their way as well." (Asimov's take on the subject is not a surprise, since his paper has a constitutional aversion to anything that smacks of big, uncultured, Middle America, whether it's big sushi or SUVs, and would probably rather see us all riding around in the glorified golf carts that clog the boulevards of Paris.)
But this misses the point. Sushi, like virtually every other kind of food, was born out of necessity, with one goal in mind: sustenance. And while, like the peasant food of France (that country's great history of sauces comes from the need to cover up the taste of rancid meat), sushi grew up to be haute cuisine, it's not hard to imagine that it had pretty humble beginnings, on Japanese docks and fishing boats hundreds of years ago. (Forget cooking it, Yoshi, just give me a slice of that tuna. Yeah. And some of that rice. You got any soy sauce around here?) If, in making the trip across the pond, the form gets edited a bit, so be it. The basis of the food is the same, and it's not being perverted like, say, American-style Chinese food. Depending on their budget, New Yorkers looking to fill up on sushi could do a lot worse than Shiki's or Yama.
Shiki's Restaurant, 69 7th Ave. S. (Bleecker St.), 206-7024.
Yama, 38-40 Carmine St. (betw. Bedford & Bleecker Sts.), 989-9330 (and other locations).