Results tagged “sushi”

     

Over the past few weeks, we've hit up new Broadway sushi joint I Love Wasabi--which unfortunately started out as "I Love Washabi"--twice. They've got a big selection of crazy rolls (and we do so enjoy crazy rolls), so we ordered four on each occasion. The first time around, we think we picked some of the better rolls from the menu, but the second time, we found the food presentation much improved (to be expected with a new restaurant).

It's been a couple of years since we last sang the praises of Kisaku. We're back to tell you we continue to go back, as Kisaku continues to be our favorite sushi restaurant in Seattle. Our most recent visit was the birthday dinner that preceded the deluge of desserts at Canlis, and the food was as good as always.

Seattle seems to be embracing kaiten sushi; Blue C is doing well, while a battle is brewing in lower Queen Anne with Genki Sushi now taking on Sushiland. Watch the plates revolve around on the conveyor belt, but choose carefully, as quality can be a (sushi) roll of the dice.

• According to the Belltowner, Belltown's latest Japanese street food restaurant, Kushibar, opened to full tables today.
• The latest North-Broadway-almost-10th-Avenue restaurant is opening next week. Will Poppy succeed or fail?
• Kirkland's downtown is having its first sidewalk sale this weekend. Here's to hoping for some summer days for shopping.

mochi by the mysterious stranger

Another gray, blustery Sunday; it felt like Seattle was going through a rinse cycle. Undaunted, Shiro Kashiba was out on the golf course, playing 36 holes before dark, then stopping for a bite of dinner in Belltown at (where else?) Shiro's, where he's been sushi master since he opened the place in 1994.

Sadly, Seattle lacks a Singaporean restaurant. The closest we’ve got are Malay Satay Hut (a favorite!) and Salima, but they’re both primarily Malaysian. So if you can’t go out for Singaporean food, then why not make it yourself?

A sakana ichiba (fish market) at Shibuya station is our favorite Tokyo battleground. Close to closing time, customers hover around the refrigerator cases, scouting out the sushi and sashimi assortments--especially the packages of maguro, mutsu, and more. Then, at about 7:45, the man with the marker does the "makete" (discounting) action, slashing prices on fish that must fly off the shelves. We jostle for position, reaching for the best boxes of uni and chunks of chu-toro that sometimes drop from a few thousand yen to a few hundred yen. It’s a fight for a feast!

On the topic of kaiten sushi, we go, well, round and round. Instant gratification in grabbing dishes upon seating, but hard to know how long they’ve sat on the conveyor belt. A festive feeling, but no natural interaction with the sushi chef. Unlimited gari (pickled ginger), but no self-serve green tea like in Japan. Cheap, but sometimes questionable quality.

Things always die down right around the holidays, so not much is going on tonight, except local noise mavens X-Ray Press will be celebrating their CD release (and the addition of their new keyboardist) at Jules Maes in Georgetown.

Our favorite local food site has been doing some thinking about politics and the way people in different cities eat and vote. They divided the number of steak restaurants by the number of sushi restaurants in a given city to come up with a "Steak/Sushi Index." Seattle's SSI, for example is 0.75, indicating that we eat more sushi than steak; the SSI of Dallas, TX is 3.01 indicating a preference for steak. Urbanspoon has been able to show that the more a city eats sushi over steak (or the lower their SSI) the more they tended to vote for Kerry over Bush in the last election.

It's still raining, but that's not stopping us this weekend. As we get ready to head out the door, the Seattlest staff is once again sharing our weekend plans in the hopes that we'll see you along the way.

Seattle. Portland. Which one's better? You may say: "How can you choose? Each has their good points. It's like asking which religion is better." Guess what, asshole, that Negative Nellie attitude is the reason nobody ever asks for your fucking opinion. Jerk. Yesterday, Jeremy Barker advocated the pro-Seattle position. Now, it's Portland's turn.

So, the Seattle P-I restaurant critic writes that "Safeco's got some of the worst food in the major leagues." That statement struck a nerve with this Seattlest, as we tend to think that Safeco has some of the best food in MLB parks.

With summer right around the corner, Seattle is starting to see some of those tasty warm-weather offerings from the local breweries. We will be calling out some of our favorite summer beers over the next few weeks for you to enjoy. We sure would not want you drinking barley wine all summer...

Most know it as a cute green glob on the corner of the sushi platter, many from mistakenly putting a large first taste in their mouths without realizing it packs a potent punch. Unlike chili pepper, which burns the tongue, wasabi strikes the sinus cavity. But it’s actually protecting you, historically used as an anti-bacterial for the raw fish that often accompanies it. Some says it’s offensive to add more than the sushi chef smears on the fish, but we don’t let that stop us. Especially when we can get the fresh stuff – lots of labor in grinding it, but the taste, while hot, is also surprisingly sweet.

Donna Giordano, a 25-year veteran of the of the grocery wars, has a lot to say about what's for dinner. As president of QFC, she runs 77 supermarkets in Washington and Oregon. But QFC is part of the giant Kroger Corp, and only a tiny part at that, so she has to convince the bean counters back in Cincinnati that Seattle shoppers care about quality.

We weren't able to take advantage of last week's free coffee giveaway at Liberty, so we stopped by the cafe/bar/sushi restaurant to purchase a cup today. We'd been there last October for a latte and were less than impressed, and we still haven't gone back for drinks ever since the bad service fiasco we endured nearly a year ago (never forget the events of 5/11). Even now, when we pass by the crowded bar in the evenings, we sigh in reminiscence of the well-mixed cocktails, but dare not venture in for fear of crappy waitstaff.

When we found that Gorditos was getting out of the lukewarm kitchen that is Queen Anne hill’s restaurant business, we started keeping tabs, via a biweekly stroll, on the eateries closing (and, less frequently, opening) in the neighborhood. That wasn’t often enough.

It's a huge menu, somewhere between "too many notes" and "there's got to be a pony in there somewhere." Chef Bruce Dillon, most recently in Florida, offers an almost overwhelming panoply of Indian, Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, Cuban, and Carribbean flavors at the soon-to-open Marazul. Perched atop Whole Foods, adjacent to the Pan Pacific Hotel, the restaurant's 170 indoor seats focus inward on a wood-and-copper décor that suggests palm trees and a whiff of the exotic.

Emboldened by our satisfactory sushi outing at Nishino, but wanting something a little more Japanese (the menu had that “pan-Asian” thing going, and there wasn’t a Japanese customer or server in sight) and a little less pretentious (two words: Madison Park), we made our way to Kisaku in Tangletown (near Green Lake).

Following last week's swanky sushi soiree in Madison Park, it was time for us to get back to our roots. We wanted something more worker-class. Inspired by Seattlest's spirited discussion of fish and chips, we decided to go to Little Chinook's at Fishermen's Terminal.

Still in the fish club of sorts, we snuck into Nishino at the very end of the November 25 for $25 promotion.

--Flying punches, flying elbows, and flying vomit: Supersonicsoul presents the greatest Sonics v. Magic moments.

A few weeks back we suggested you might lay off the local salmon, you know keep your mercury levels in check and all that good stuff. However, in even more doomsday-ish news, some marine biologists are concerned that we might not have fish to avoid eating within the next 40 years.

We’re crazy about ramen. It might go back to Tampopo, the 1985 “Noodle Western” centered around a ramen shop, with its memorable raw egg and saliva swapping scene. While that movie glamorized the noodles for us, we’d never been to a real ramen shop, instead settling for the 8-for-a-buck version and always wondering just what’s inside those seasoning packets.

Seattlest still hadn't been back to Liberty after the bad service fiasco we encountered there when sampling their drinks and sushi early this spring. Once bitten, twice shy, and we haven't received official word that they've gotten their shit together just yet. But earlier this week, we were up on 15th running a few errands when we saw sandwich boards advertising Liberty's espresso.

Alice Cooper was right about one thing: school was out for summer. But his corollary argument was faulty: school need not be out forever.

The other day we were perusing Citysearch’s lists because we had nothing better to do and about 20 minutes in which to do it. Every now and again we hit upon a morsel of an interesting suggestion, but mostly we just disagreed with everything. Our biggest pet peeve is most definitely their Best Sushi list.