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.
NYC Sushi: Sushi Seki (Mar. 2013)
Author: Victor
Restaurant: Sushi Seki
Chef: Seki (I can’t find his first name on Google; we’ll just assume his first name is “Chef” ^_^.)
Date: March 9, 2013
Notes:
Sushi Seki is one of the more famous sushi places in the Upper East Side, and I’ve wanted to try it for a while now. It’s known for its inventive/fusion sushi, and in that respect it’s very similar to Sushi of Gari—both specialize in sosaku sushi, which involves using other ingredients, such as sauces, to complement and pair with the fish.
Seki’s actually quite a bit cheaper than Gari, so price is definitely something to keep in consideration if you’re choosing between the two. ALSO, the sushi bar is apparently open until 2:30 to 3:00 a.m. That… is… amazing. I kind of want to come back when I’m drunk. (Then again, good sushi would probably be wasted on me in that state. Still… I WANT TO TRY.)
Food-wise, both have great seafood, but the rice at Seki was a taaaaaaad bit too hard/grainy for my taste. (The temperature was about right, though!) I prefer the sushi rice at Gari (either at the Upper East Side or Upper West Side location) to that of Seki.
Unfortunately, a few of the sushi pieces are inspired by (or stolen from, depending on your viewpoint) Gari but were inferior in taste. Apparently, Seki trained at Sushi of Gari, and he utilizes (or copied) quite a few of Gari’s creations (for instance, the tuna with tofu sauce, freshwater eel with avocado, and salmon with sautéed tomato).
Seki also might have more variety than Gari does. Gari has about ~50 different combinations, while our sushi chef at Seki implied that they still had many more combinations available after we finished our meal. We actually took that as a challenge to eat more haha, but we decided it’d be better to eat less so that we could prepare for the massive amount of drinking later on in the night—four friends were celebrating their birthdays, which meant… SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS!!!
Food:
1. Chūtoro (medium-fatty tuna).
The fish was excellent, but the rice was a bit too hard.
NYC: Empellón Cocina: The Push Project: Part II (Mar. 2013)
Authors: Victor and Jessie
Restaurant: Empellón Cocina (Push Project II)
Chefs: Jordan Kahn and Alex Stupak
Date: March 8, 2013
Victor’s Notes:
I follow Empellón Cocina on Facebook, and they’re one of the more interesting NYC restaurants that I like to keep track of, especially because their chef is Alex Stupak. He used to be known as one of the top pastry chefs in the country, and he was Alinea’s original pastry chef.
Every few months, Alex Stupak collaborates with a chef he strongly respects to create guest chef dinners under the name of “The Push Project”. Part I of “The Push Project” involved Enrique Olvera. For Part II of “The Push Project”, Chef Stupak decided to collaborate with Jordan Kahn, who Stupak worked with at Alinea. Kahn is currently the Exec Chef of Red Medicine, and he’s worked with pastries at Per Se, Alinea, and Varietal. You can find info on this collaboration at http://www.empellon.com/cocina/single.html?id=1591236.
Because the two chefs were superstar pastry chefs, there’s a huge focus on sweets. The meal consisted of four savory courses and five sweet courses. I think you have to really like desserts to be able to really appreciate all of the desserts as the sweets might be too much for some people. Overall, the savory courses were great, and the desserts were AMAZING, both in terms of taste and conceptually.
Monte
Victor
tadv3
Happy Noms 