Two dinner hits from the recent trip to NYC.
First up was Avra, a Greek seafood restaurant in midtown. Their specialty is whole fish, grill-roasted over charcoal, deboned, and butterflied, dressed simply with a little olive oil, some large capers, and parsley. What it wasn’t dressed with was salt, which is criminal. You pay by the pound, so it’s not a great deal for one person since they don’t seem to sell anything under a pound, and a pound of whole fish is a lot for one person to eat. I went with the server’s suggestion, lavraki, a relatively tasteless white fish with a texture like that of branzino (sea bream). For a starter, I went with a salad of goat cheese, red onions, and arugula with a balsamic vinegar dressing, which was a little odd because I don’t associate balsamic vinegar with Greece at all. The goat cheese came spread on two small crostini and had nothing to do with the underdressed pile of arugula at the center of the plate. In fact, the only real positive of the meal was the fresh, crusty peasant bread and the thin hummus and delicious brined olives. I hate olives – one of the only foods I genuinely do not like, along with most kinds of ham, eggplant, and corned beef – but the brown olives (cultivar unknown, unfortunately) were out of this world.
The following night’s meal was better, at Sushiden, a rather hopping sushi place also in Midtown. It’s places like Sushiden that remind me of how rare it is to find fresh, high-quality sushi, because the flavor and texture of their fish demolishes anything I’ve had outside of New York and California. You pay for the quality, though – prices started at about $3.50 per piece for nigiri and went well north of $10. I stuck mostly to less expensive fish, like the incredibly tender salmon (sake), but stepped out a little for one piece of the daily special Japanese grouper ($10) and the fatty bigeye tuna ($8). The only fish that wasn’t out of this world was the freshwater eel (unagi), which was tough and fishy. I was also impressed that the meal finishes with a cup of hojicha, a green tea where the leaves are roasted, leaving an incredibly smooth beverage without the heavy grassy notes of good green teas. The only negative of Sushiden is that it’s hard to see getting out of there for under $75 a person without even including alcohol. One additional positive was that the clientele was overwhelmingly Japanese.
Really? No ham? I don’t know what to say…
Only certain salt-cured hams, like prosciutto or jamón serrano. But a baked ham? Sliced ham at the deli? Yech.
I think it is clear now that sushi is the greatest kind of food on the planet.
This is completely unrelated, but I feel the need to ask anyways. My apologies.
I just noticed that Joey Gathright has an OPS of .570. Can you think of a single thing that would make this palatable? Is there a worse player in baseball right now? And, last but certainly not least, how stupid do you have to be to give 430 at bats (the number he is projected to right now) to a player of his caliber?
“One additional positive was that the clientele was overwhelmingly Japanese.”
Hehe, this reminded me of good old SWPL #71:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/20/71-being-the-only-white-person-around/
Keith, you really don’t get amaebi? It’s probably the best “bang for your buck” sushi, it’s hard to mess up, and I’ve yet to have bad amaebi in all my years, no matter where I’ve had sushi.
Aaron: You know, I read your first question about that as “amoebas.” You’re referring to raw shrimp, right? I won’t eat raw shellfish at all, not even oysters. The risk of food-borne illness is too high.
Ness: It’s not a question of race, but the authenticity of the food. I’d feel the same way about a Greek clientele in a Greek restaurant.
Incidentally, I’ve always found SWPL to be incredibly racist. White people like grammar … and so, by extension, blacks are incapable of using proper grammar? What about a “stuff black people like” site – would that be funny, or just offensive? I’m not asking you to defend it. I just find it bizarre.
Jeremy: They love him. I can’t explain it either.
If you’ve not read it already, I recommend the book The Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson. He follows this girl who is going through training to be a sushi chef. In telling her story, he goes through many diversions explaining the history of sushi, how it has changed over hundreds of years, how soy sauce was first made, etc.
Corson also wrote “The Secret Life of Lobsters” which is another great non-fiction look at seafood and the people who provide it to us.
Sushiden is pretty legit. Among the better blue fin Tuna I have had. Definitely pricey though.
By the way, the raw shrimp is often not served Raw, but rather still alive. I remember for my 13th birthday my father took me to Hatsuhana and they let me catch my own sweet shrimp in the tank. You eat it by biting it off at the head and eating the body. Then they take the head and bake if for you, which is the best part in my opinion.
Which brings me to the issue regarding “raw” shellfish. Oysters really aren’t served raw, but rather alive. If they were transported dead and then served raw, that would be deadly. It would also be really really noticeable as there is no mistaking a dead oyster for a live one. They open up and loose all their liquor in hours.
I consume a couple dozen oysters on the half shell a month, even in the summer (Canadian Oysters in months without “r”) and really couldn’t imagine life without them.
Not far from Shea Stadium is Steakhouse called Christos. The staff are all rabid Mets fans. During road trips I often catch games at their bar. Pale Ale, Oysters and Baseball were made for one and other.
Amaebi is raw (some places call it “sweet shrimp” but I don’t see it). I only suggested it because along with the sushi, they will fry the shrimp heads for you and serve it with a nice sauce that’s similar to a tempura dipping sauce. But yeah, the chance of food-borne illness is extremely high, though I don’t eat sushi very often.
Aaron, ama-ebi literally translates to “sweet shrimp” in Japanese. So that’s why.
Keith, I can’t say that I totally blame you for staying away from raw shellfish. But I do think you’re missing out. I’ve been eating the stuff since I was a kid and have never had a problem nor have I met someone who has. But I guess it all depends on your own personal risk analysis. My philosophy has always been to eat first and worry about things later.
Of course SWPL is racist. That’s kind of the point. It’s called satire.
I’ve always found that unagi is one of the most hit-or-miss dishes in sushi.
Dan, that’s actually interesting to me. Because the vast majority of sushi restaurants don’t use fresh unagi. They buy them pre-broiled and come frozen in vacuum-sealed packages. So all they usually do is heat those up (can be put into a broiler, convection oven, microwaved, or even boiled), put it on sushi rice, dab on some sweet kaba-yaki sauce on it, and put it on a plate. So essentially, they’re all serving pretty similar stuff. Handling live unagi takes quite a bit of skill that most sushi chefs don’t have.