Fish of high enough quality to safely be eaten uncooked is expensive. Sushi chefs skilled enough to know about how to select and how to slice the fish are expensive. Japanese food is generally sparse, particular, meticulously displayed (it doesn't come in a slab), thus expensive. And then, of course, you pay extra for the cachet. <g>
Makes for the perfect diet food...
[I've started going to a new sashimi place. Today was my fourth trip. It's a bit of a struggle but the food is good and it's a better value than my previous restaurant. This one is a Korean restaurant in the heart of a Korean enclave. Translate that to "they do things the back home way and they don't speak a bit of English." Only about a fourth of the menu is translated into English. It has been a bit of an adventure. An advantage of this place over the previous one is that they offer little Korean vegetable side dishes with their meals. Their kimchee is too hot for me but I enjoy the other dishes.
My problem is the radish. For the uninitiated, sashimi plates usually come attractively arranged on and around little piles of shredded daikon radish. I don't know how they shred it but the result is long strings. Sometimes the strings are a few inches, sometimes nearly a foot long. Hard to eat when they're a foot long. Well, this place puts the sashimi on a bed of the stuff that resembles a birds nest, not cut at all and all knotted up. The first time I encountered this I just left the radish uneaten. The third trip I tried lifting a few stands and then twirling them around my chop sticks like you'd twirl spaghetti on your plate. But I had lifted as high as I could reach, a good two feet and there was no end to the strands. They were so snarled that I ended up lifting the whole nest but still couldn't shake my strands loose. I looked woefully at the waitress hoping she would show me how to eat it but instead she came with scissors and cut it into manageable chunks. The next time we were back to the bird's nest. Today they were very, very busy so I took some initiative and sawed through it with the corner of my chopstick. I know that's bad manners but, well...
The only thing I can conclude is that they don't expect people to eat the radish, that it's only there for display. But I don't know that and I don't have any way of asking. Their clientelle is almost exclusively Koreans conversing in Korean. I keep hoping someone will order sashimi so I can watch but that hasn't happened yet. Today I noticed that they had a separate sashimi menu, which I glanced at while waiting to be seated. The first item was $240.
It's not just a diet lunch but an adventure... ] |
