[title type="h5"]Thursday, January 9, 2014[/title]
My route home from the radio station is determined completely by my appetite for dinner. If it becomes circuitous, it means that I'm not sure what I want. My feeble inclinations run into my editorial needs: which restaurants do I need to visit? I know this process has led me astray when I'm closing in on the unavoidable intersection of I-10 and Causeway Boulevard.
I was almost there when a compromise was reached. I've been to the new, much larger and spiffier Little Tokyo in Metairie. It opened a few months ago with what I think is now the longest sushi bar in the city. And the almost incomprehensible menu. Whoever designed it wasn't thinking about how well a customer could read it, just by how cool a printed page it was.
This new place--on Causeway near the confusing and inconvenient intersection with West Napoleon--is now the flagship for the Little Tokyo empire. It was the second sushi bar to open in this area, and has always been one of the best. Over the years it sprouted branches (many of them franchises) all over the city.
This new place is very different from the original. The latter was quiet, small, spartan, and traditional, right down to the Japanese music that played in the background. Now we have what Al Copeland would have done if he ever opened a Japanese restaurant. It's like something out of Las Vegas, with a dark, spotlit, oversize dining room. A lot of customers. A karaoke club in the rear. (I've never been there when anyone else was. I suspect it operates late in the evening.)
The service style is different. Instead of the soft-spoken Asian waitresses that drifted in and out of the picture, there are the same kind of gabby, American servers that every other hip restaurant has. The advantage of this is that you actually get full information on all the availabilities on the menu and from the sushi bar.
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House salad at Little Tokyo.[/caption]
I began with an unusually large salad with the standard ginger dressing. And a cup of miso soup. The waiter touted me on a new appetizer from the kitchen that involved oysters baked in a mayonnaise-based sauce on half an eggplant. You could call this Japanese Creole, but this may well be a traditional Japanese dish. It was big enough to split four ways, and it would have been better that way. The mayo made it too rich to wear well, but I gathered and ate all the oysters.
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Eggplant and oysters.
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The sushi and sashimi platter was a long time in coming, held up by the eggplant thing. But I didn't mind. I had a big Asahi beer to get through. And then the fish arrived, all fresh. (I make that distinction because most of the fish served in most of the sushi bars around here comes in frozen.) Here I had scallops, red snapper, sheepshead, halibut, yellowtail, salmon and tuna. No big score on presentation--all this was served more or less routinely, so much so that I didn't take a picture of it--but all the flavors were right there where I wanted them.
If I had been even a little hungry after all this, I could have constructed a meal of three more courses of items that sounded good to me. But I think Little Tokyo will probably still be there when the urge strikes me again.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris January 17, 2014 13:01 in
