Yaku to swim with the (raw) fishes

We interrupt Y&H’s Home Cooking Day to pass along this news: Yaku, the Latin Concept restaurant dedicated to chifa cuisine and other Peruvian specialties, will close in January and reopen as a rock ‘n’ roll/sushi establishment.

Mauricio Fraga-Rosenfeld, founder of the Latin Concepts group of fashionable restaurant/lounges, tells Y&H that he was forced to sell Yaku after disappointing sales. The restaurant opened in October 2008, and Latin Concepts couldn’t find a way to overcome its poor location and keep the place packed.

“Great concept and a very bad location,” Fraga-Rosenfeld says over the phone. “The location should have been downtown.”

The Latin Concepts owner compares Yaku’s woes to Oyamel, the Mexican small-plates restaurant in Crystal City that couldn’t make a go of it until THINKfoodGROUP relocated it to downtown D.C.  “They moved to D.C. and did extremely well,” Fraga-Rosenfeld adds.

Read More “Yaku to Close and Turn into a Rock ‘n’ Roll/Sushi Concept” »

Not Niwano Hana, but doesn’t it look tasty?

There are those among us who like to say that D.C. isn’t a sushi town, that we pale in comparison to places like Los Angeles and New York. I have to admit that I’m among those naysayers. But Rater jrachlin says there’s good sushi in Rockville.

Here is jrachlin’s review of Niwano Hana:

Read More “Vox Populi: Restaurant Rater jrachlin on Rockville’s Niwano Hana” »

This is embarrassing — for Y&H and for many other sources that have consistently equated the dishes served at Makoto to the more formal kaiseki dining found in Japan.

I spoke with Michiko Lecuyer, a manager at Makoto, who assured me that the tiny Palisades restaurant does not specialize in kaiseki. Rather, Lecuyer says after consulting with the kitchen, Makoto prefers to be known as an omakase house, where the chefs prepare a free-form, multi-course menu based on their own tastes and the whims of the season.

I pressed Lecuyer on this because so many food outlets refer to Makoto as a kaiseki or kaiseki-style house. Y&H has committed this sin. So has the Washingtonian (even in passing). Ditto for Capital Spice, Chowhound, Food & Wine, Fearless Critic, and no doubt countless other writers who have temporarily escaped my attention.

Read More “Once and For All, Makoto Does Not Specialize in Kaiseki Cuisine” »

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

The first time I visited Makoto, I made the mistake of trying to engage with the tight-lipped chef behind the counter. I was thinking, you know, that I’d have a real sushi-bar experience and get to know the chef so that he could serve me a more custom-built omakase. That’s when the diner a few seats down at the bar started clearing his throat. I glanced over, almost certain of the punishment to come, and sure enough, the dude was giving me the business about talking to the sushi master. I would soon learn that talking goes against the meditative spirit of Makoto, which specializes in kaiseki cuisine, an elegant style of cooking and presentation that mirrors the formality of a Japanese tea ceremony. It may sound ridiculously fussy, but once you give yourself over to the experience, you’ll find nothing else like it in D.C. You start by removing your shoes in an anteroom and donning a pair of pillow-soft slippers. From there, you will be pampered by an almost geisha-like server, who will, if you permit, bring you a tasting menu full of delicacies, many of them seasonal. It could be as humble as soba noodles with spring mushrooms or as luxuriant as Kobe beef. All told, it’s a ritual artistic and delicious enough to humble you into silence, even when you feel like talking the chef’s ear off.

 Makoto, 4822 MacArthur Blvd. NW, (202) 298-6866

Tucked into a secluded corner just north of the Capitol, Washington’s best sushi joint boasts an appropriately monumental view. Momoyama’s chopstick-wielders look out upon a huge concrete slab supporting I-395. Crane your head to the right, and you can just make out the huge concrete slab supporting an off-ramp, too. In order to reach the obscure commuter pit, sushi-seekers must pick through an equally mind-numbing sight—a sidewalk spillover of Capitol Hill debauchery provided by neighboring happy-hour joints My Brother’s Place and Hamilton’s. Thankfully, Momoyama’s food compensates for the unsavory visual feast. The Miller Lite crowd rarely filters into the joint in search of post-binge tempura; instead, Momoyama rolls its succulent white tuna, sweet eel, and Korean bulgogi sushi creations for regulars and Capitol Hill tour groups gone astray. The Samurai Roll, a confluence of eel, white tuna, salmon, cucumber, and caviar, is enough to lift anyone above the concrete jungle outside.

Momoyama, 231 2nd St NW. (202) 737-0397

Trevor Corson, the self-proclaimed sushi concierge who gave me a lesson in nikiri sauce last summer, is all over The Atlantic these days, arguing that American chefs, not Japanese, will be the ones to provide us with an authentic sushi experience like you can find back in Japan.

Corson’s examples may be few — too few, perhaps, to argue a trend — but he tells a persuasive story about Nick Macioge, the chef at Fin Sushi in Lenox in western Massachusetts, and how he’s bucking a trend:

Read More “Corson Argues that American Chefs Are Putting the Tradition and Fun Back in Sushi” »

The sushi chef, his long tapered knife as sharp as a new razor, effortlessly slices through a rectangular slab of ruby-red tuna. Moments later, he takes that strip of ahi in one hand and grabs a clump of sushi rice with the other, coolly and quickly forming the seasoned grains into an oblong base. He caps the rice ball, known as tawara, with the fresh tuna slice and places the finished bite with the others.

I’m standing here at the North Sea Restaurant and Sushi Bar in Adams Morgan, watching chef Jhang Bin put together my lunch-time order of “sushi deluxe,” which includes nigiri pieces of salmon, yellowtail, red snapper, mackerel, barbecue eel, and tuna, not to mention a sectioned California roll stuffed with avocado and crab stick. I’ve witnessed such transfixing displays of sushi craft many times before—but nothing like this one.

Directly in front of me is a cabinet filled with cheap, carry-out wine and sake. Behind the cabinet is a cooler built into the wall, offering sixers and 24-ounce cans of American lager to go. Above that cooler is a rack packed with Marlboros, Newports, Camels, Kools, even the odd box of Dutch Masters cigars. A flatscreen TV above the cigs broadcasts CNN.

The scene, I’d argue, is ripe with metaphor. It depicts not just a restaurant in transition, but an entire neighborhood.

Read More “North Sea Restaurant Wades into Japanese Waters” »

Much of the region’s inauguration-themed food and drink, ranging from an all-Hawaiian menu at fyve restaurant lounge at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City to deep-dish pizza at Rustico in Alexandria, will roll out later this week. But here at Young & Hungry Central, we’ve been combing the area, trying to find those inauguration eats already out there. Here’s what we’ve found:

Read More “Inauguration Eats: An Early Look at Obama-Related Food and Drink” »

The wife and I stopped by Ichiban Sushi in McLean the other day for lunch. It’s a homey, humble spot that serves standard-issue nigiri and hand rolls. It’d be a good restaurant to frequent if you lived in the neighborhood and had a hankering for raw fish. The only reason I’m singling out the place is because of a certain menu item that caught my attention—the Utah roll.

Read More “Nothing Says Japan Like A Utah Roll” »

It’s been slim pickings for restaurant openings in the last few months, for the obvious reason, but Penn Quarter Living is reporting that the Asian-themed SEI Restaurant and Lounge will debut on Monday, Jan. 12, at 444 Seventh St. NW. It’s owned by the same folks who brought us the fire-and-ice opulence of Oya on Ninth Street NW, just a few blocks away.

PQ Living describes the new menu as “Modern Asian cuisine,” as created by “Noriaki Yasutake (sushi master) and Avinesh Ranav (chef), both formerly from Perry’s in Adams Morgan.” The site further explains:

Read More “SEI Restaurant and Lounge Set to Open Next Week” »