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Houston Sushi: Uchi (Mar. 2013)
Author: Victor
Restaurant: Uchi
Exec Chef: Tyson Cole
Chef de Cuisine: Kaz Edwards
Website: http://uchirestaurants.com/houston/index.php
Date: March 20, 2013
Notes:
I have wanted to try Uchi for a few months now, especially after hearing my friends from Texas rave about it. Anyway, I decided to visit a friend in Houston because I was in the area (New Orleans! Whoo!), and I decided that I should finally try the restaurant!
The restaurant’s a LOT bigger than I thought it would be. The restaurant would NOT be able to be as big as it was in NYC haha. Oh, Texas… Anyway, the restaurant has five separate dining areas. The wine bar seating has no reservations, and you can sit there and eat or drink if you can manage to snag a seat. The cocktail tables outside serve cocktails and little snacks, such as edamame. The tables and sushi bar usually have reservations, but you can still get seated if you wait (usually at least an hour); Uchi only allows reservations for a relatively small portion of the tables/seats. You can’t reserve directly for the sushi bar, though; it’s on a first-come, first-serve basis. Lastly, the private dining room is generally for dinner parties or business dinners.
We arrived about an hour early, so we just started chatting a bit near the wine bar. We eventually snagged seats at the wine bar and ordered a few appetizers before we started our main meal (comprised of mainly nigiri) at the sushi bar.
The food’s fantastic and really, really creative. I personally think some of the places in NYC are better in terms of traditional nigiri, especially when you consider only the rice and the fish. I’ve had places in NYC with better fish, rice, or both, but what this place does well (and it does it REALLY well) is execution of more modern and innovative flavor combinations. You have to check out the menu to see what I mean! (You can check out the menu here.)
I really wish I could eat everything on the menu. Everything just looks… delicious, fascinating, innovative, creative, and at times even genius, crazy, or both. Chef Cole is onto something here. I really wish NYC had a restaurant like this.
Nigiri analysis:
The rice was about room temperature and could arguably be a little warmer. Also, it wasn’t too fluffy; it could definitely be a little softer and fluffier.
The fish was really fresh overall, but I think the rarer pieces (like the threadfin snapper or the albacore) were better than the more common pieces (like akami or sake). I thought this was a shame; really good akami is something that can make me a really happy eater—the akami here was merely good :(.
Regarding the nigiri, the fish didn’t always melt in my mouth, and it could be pretty inconsistent. At times, the sushi piece was amazing, and the fish tasted really, really fresh; at other times, the nigiri merely tasted pretty good.
I’m a little sad that Uchi doesn’t serve chūtoro, ōtoro, or tamago. I’m curious as to what Chef Cole would do with those ingredients.
NYC: Kappō at Má Pêche (Mar. 2013)
Authors: Victor and Monte
Restaurant: Má Pêche
Owner: David Chang
Chef: Paul Carmichael
Date: March 13, 2013
Kappō at Má Pêche (aka Kappo at Ma Peche)
Victor’s Notes:
Má Pêche is the last NYC restaurant in the Momofuku empire that I haven’t really tried yet (and I still haven’t really eaten here yet—I don’t really think Kappō counts as eating at the restaurant). Anyway, they recently got a new chef and launched a new “secret” tasting menu called Kappō! It’s only been out for a few weeks, so I was pretty excited to try it out.
Chef Paul calls you the day before your reservation to confirm it, and he also asks you what your names are as well as your favorite cocktails. You basically get that drink, with your name on it, right when you sit down. I didn’t really want to drink much that night, so we just get non-alcoholic drinks.
There’s one seating a night for eight people, and you get to converse with the Chef and other staff about anything, such as food, life in other countries, or even sports. There was even one moment where Chef Paul called me out for preferring Minetta Tavern’s Black Label Burger over In-N-Out and Shake Shack hahaha :(.
We got non-alcoholic drink pairings to go with our meal.
SF: Hachi Ju Hachi (in Saratoga, CA) (Feb. 2013)
I love Hachi Ju Hachi. There are a couple restaurants that make me feel instantly at home the moment I step into the dining room, and Hachi Ju Hachi is one of them. It’s not just the clean and neat decor, or the increasingly numerous handwritten notes on the walls of the restaurant from former customers (if you order the kaiseki, you literally get to leave your mark on the restaurant – my sister somehow wrote on the ceiling).
What makes Hachi Ju Hachi wonderful is the food and the chef. It’s like stepping in my grandma’s kitchen, if my grandma cooked badass Japanese home-style cooking and had a wonderful sense of humor that made me feel at ease. Chef Suzuki-San is always in the kitchen with a bright smile plastered onto his face and has a fantastic sense of humor that just makes you feel like you’re part of the family. And he serves fantastic food that reveals an underlying intensity about food that hides well behind his friendly grin.
This isn’t an izakaya or a sushi bar (although there is hakozushi (boxed style sushi)). It’s much closer to kaiseki a la carte, with actual kaiseki options available if you call ahead. On my most recent trip I didn’t try the Kaiseki, but we did order a ton of the dishes and a lot of them kept me floating on a blissful cloud 9 made of great flavors. Let’s get to the food:
Eggplant deep fried with grated mountain yam and seaweed
Oops my chopsticks got to this dish before the camera did. I don’t know how that happened. The eggplant was slightly sweet and salty, and I loved the milky texture of the grated mountain yam.
Monte
Victor
tadv3
Happy Noms 