Sushi: The Trough of Less Flavor

chirashi sushi at Pacific East

Before I begin, the title of this post does not refer to my low opinion of the quality of sushi available in this area. It may sound that way for the first couple paragraphs, but I actually mean something else entirely. That’s explained below if you’re intersted.

A few years ago I did a tour of Cleveland’s sushi restaurants. I didn’t get to nearly all of them but I did cover a lot of territory. It was pretty frustrating. Ultimately, my conclusion was that there’s only one decent option in the city. Your choices are Pacific East or Hopkins International Airport. (If you want Japanese food but not sushi there is one more choice. Flying Cranes has excellent udon noodle soup and curry. I’m sure I’ll love all of their other Japanese food when I get around to trying it. I can recommend them with complete confidence.)

Aside from wasting a lot of meals at mediocre restaurants, I have a couple other regrets. The first is that I didn’t pay much attention to the cooked food at any of these restaurants. The other is that I didn’t keep careful records of my investigation. As a result, I’m completely paralyzed when it comes trying new sushi restaurants (in Cleveland) or expanding my Japanese eating (in Cleveland) beyond sushi. I’m afraid I’ll end up revisiting some crappy restaurant I’ve already been to. And it’s hard to get excited about trying cooked food at a bunch of restaurants where I’ve already been disappointed with something else. It’s gotten to the point where Japanese food is something that I do when I travel. I had some okay sushi at a Thai/Korean/Japanese restaurant several months ago. The last time I experimented with a new strictly Japanese/sushi restaurant in Cleveland was December 6, 2007.

In all that time, I’ve still been collecting information about new (and new to me) sushi restaurants. For those of you who are braver then I am, here’s some of my data.

Cleveland sushi restaurants on a map:

There are even a couple as far away as Akron. I haven’t gotten around to adding all of them to the map so here’s a link to the relevant bookmarks on del.icio.us (mixed in with more local restaurants).

One faint glimmer of hope for sushi in Ohio lies even farther away. I’ve read that oases of excellent Japanese food exist in Findlay and Columbus, those cities being beneficiaries of eddies of immigration related to the auto industry.

I’ll probably end my sushi experimentation drought some time soon at Shinano. I read that they make their own teriyaki sauce. That’s enough to get me to visit at least once and while I’m there, I’ll take a chance on some sushi for an appetizer.

I once read about a restaurant in the highest echelon of sushi restaurants that stored their fish for a short period of time before serving it. I wish I could track down the original article and identify the specific restaurant. I don’t think it was Sushi Yasuda but that should certainly do to establish the credibility of my claim. Chef Yasuda is an unimpeachable source:

NY: Yes, this is old Japan. Big cuts are seen as a positive thing in this new sushi world, which is not necessarily true. Also, people think that the fresher a fish is the better it is. This is generally true, but some fish are actually better after a day or two of preparation. Old Japan is standard. I am standard. You see nothing extraordinary here. Extraordinary is new Japan.

I don’t know whether this is standard practice at the best sushi restaurants or whether it is peculiar to the one or two restaurants that I’ve read about. In any case, it bothers me when a restaurant takes pains to emphasize how amazingly fresh their fish is as though the freshest fish is best in all cases and there’s not even any question about it. Incidentally, note Chef Yasuda’s observation about the super-sizing of sushi portions.

My recollections of the original article are hazy but I believe it discussed this issue specifically as it relates to tuna. Immediately after the fish is caught the taste is supposedly sublime. If you can’t eat your tuna on the boat, then you may be better of waiting rather than eating it as soon as you get it. This period of time before the flavor of the fish partially recovers is what I am naming “the trough of less flavor.”

Another sushi related pet peeve of mine is the notion that frozen fish is never acceptable. Sushi Fresh From the Deep . . . the Deep Freeze – New York Times:

But Shin Tsujimura, the sushi chef at Nobu, closer to Wall Street, said he froze his own tuna. ”Even I cannot tell the difference between fresh and frozen in a blind test,” he said.

Even Masa Takayama, whose sushi temple Masa, in the Time Warner Center, charges a minimum of $300 to worship, said he used frozen tuna when fresh is unavailable.

The article shows its age clearly, by the way. $300 dollars won’t get you much of anything at Masa in 2009.

The sushi battles in Cleveland seem to be fought exclusively between the forces of civilization and decency and those who think that avocado and cream cheese belong in sushi, drown their fish with soy sauce and suffocate it with flourescent horseradish. It will be a long time, if ever, before Cleveland’s sushi culture has evolved to the point where customers expect nigiri that can be consumed in one bite or sushi that’s served at the optimal temperature (right out of the refrigerator case is too cold).