Annie's New York Eats

You Want a Raw Egg with That?

The handmade Madera Ovales M4 tub is made to measure to fit a room and comes in woods like walnut ($41,000), shown; beech ($32,000); and teak or wenge ($52,000); (610) 831-0214 or wsbathcollections.com for information and retailers.--From the New York Times, 05/10/08

Now, come on. Am I actually the first one to say that this bathtub looks like a gigantic salad bowl?

If I kept this thing in my house long enough I know I'd succumb to one of those urges I get to be "funny" (in my own opinion, anyway) and do a sight gag even when there's no one around to appreciate it, and I would get an immense crust of bread and a head of elephant garlic and rub this sucker from drain to rim.

Because that's what you do with a wooden salad bowl if you want to make a Caesar salad.

Oh, never mind.

BTW, I'm only including it here with sales information because I think I legally have to (that's the way it appeared in the Times). It's not like I'm selling stuff through objective-looking copy that then you take another look and you realize it was sponsored by Guido's Plumbing or the Federal Society for the Advancement of Teak. Because I don't roll that way, no sir. I just don't.

Aspirational Thymus

One of our favorite blogs is French Laundry at Home, a classy and well-illustrated series of essays on the pleasures and pitfalls of cooking from Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook.

This cookbook, one of the most popular $50 books of all time, is lovely to look at and a foodie's joy to read. The dishes are unutterably fancy, and they generally are comprised of three or four recipes combined to compliment each other and turn up on one plate. The photographs are lush and somewhat beyond reality, but not to the point where it seems completely impossible to produce something like that from one's own kitchen.

The book is aspirational in nature. Like, you can aspire to this level of expertise. Maybe you won't really be able to do this, but maybe, just maybe, you might.

That the recipes, written and tested by Chef Keller, Susie Heller and the excellent writer Michael Ruhlman, are reasonably easy to follow, is pretty much a miracle. Haute cuisine is not generally created for home use, and why should it be? Practically by definition, Chef Keller's food is the type you eat in a restaurant maybe once a year or once in a lifetime. Working Moms and Dads are not serving up Tapioca and Pearls (poached oysters served on a bed of tapioca with...no, forget it, I can't even describe it right) as a quotidian dinner before soccer practice.

And, thank God, outside of certain enclaves in college towns, hosts and hostesses no longer commit warfare on each other's stomachs and status levels by evilly preparing ever-haute-ier dinner parties for each other. It's a kinder, gentler foodie world, and Olympic-level food prep is the right of any citizen who likes that kind of thing.

Carol Blymire of FLAH likes it, and she'll make you like it too. With a good batterie de cuisine, some food prep training, and access to the rich markets and butcher shops of the Washington, DC area, Carol fearlessly prepares everything from offal to oysters in the manner of The Greatest Restaurant in America (the French Laundry, of course, unless it's splitting the title with chef Keller's Per Se this year).

'Breads. Go ahead and gag.

So where does the thymus kick in? Well, it's the kind of thing Carol would prepare on FLAH. Me, I roll a little differently...I am, as Adam Roberts would put it, a hunter rather than a gatherer. I go to the market without a shopping list, prepared to be imaginative with whatever is best and freshest and within my budget. So, when I found a small frozen plastic container labelled "sweetbreads", I didn't hesitate for a minute...and, once I had brought it home and looked up Chef Keller's recipes for this popular gland, I didn't hesitate either, but slammed that search shut (I know when I'm licked) and went to Food TV and found a recipe for "grilled sweetbreads" which was labelled "simple."

It was, kind of. It involved rinsing the sweetbreads, which turned out to be a bagful of membrane and bletch and occasional little curds of meat which, I reminded myself, were no more disgusting than foie gras (not that I've ever prepared foie gras, outside of opening those little cans from Strasbourg). After prepping and pressing and boiling in a gallon of water with a cup of vinegar (which, honestly, is a hell of a way to treat anything you bring into your house; what next, beating with a carpet wand on the front porch?) I bathed the 'breads in olive oil and aromatics and turned them over to my cast-iron grill pan, there to get all golden-brown. But, my friends...dinner turned out to be pretzels that night. Because the thymus was terrible. It tasted like it had absorbed twelve different diseases of young calfs during its working days, plus a certain amount of iron (in its mineral form) so I did what Carol Blymire never does, and I trashed the lot.

I'm not as brave or strong as Carol, so her wonderful blog is more "imaginary" than "aspirational" to me. I'm just not in the Keller class. But, hey...anything this guy does, I can at least attempt.

The kindly and attainable Alton Brown

Mother's Kitchen, Daughter's Hunger

My Beautiful Daughter, 18 years old and moderately mentally retarded, points to a bunch of asparagus at the supermarket and says, "I'd like it if you bought that celery."

"You know it isn't celery," I said. "It's asparagus. You've had it."

"It's celery," she says. "Maybe I should try some."

"It's not a free sample," I say. "Tracy--"

But she has worked one thin spear out of the bundle, and she bites off the tip and smiles. "Mmm," she says. "Good celery!"

Maybe it's the way I've been feeling disconnected every since my mother became ill and died. Maybe it's the way Tracy seems so different, suddenly; the result of the harsh medications which keep her seizures (somewhat) at bay. She's more rebellious, less polite, less loving and much less happy.

Some people say, "What do you want--she's a teenager!" I've known my girl since she was in utero, and this isn't part of her. Cheerfulness and quick wit and a realistic point of view are all her. Disconnectedness is not.

Then again, my mother's primary memory of me has always been: "You were a very quiet little girl. Very decorous. Very obedient." Plainly, daughters can be strangers to their mothers.

I was actually a pain in the ass. A wise guy. Someone who never knew when to shut up, and never knew what was good for her. And I wasn't actually afraid of anything except Mom herself.

Mom thought that my presence in her life, my relationship to her, robbed her of something crucial: time, power, dignity, self-respect. A therapist once explained to me that Mom saw me as if I was a pair of her dirty underpants that she found in her school books, her lectures, her manuscripts, her scholarly notes. I kept popping up and I was disgusting, shameful and intrusive. How could she help but hate me?

I still think that only a man, a Freudian psychiatrist, could have come up with such a horrible idea. In essence, it was correct, but he missed the part which was most shaming to my mother: that she loved me.

She knocked herself out making Sunday dinners for us, but, having just read her recipe files, I can see why the food always tasted thin and woeful and rejecting. Stringy beef and sour canned tomatoes are no way to start a stir-fry. Heavy cream cannot be left out of a recipe which calls for a cup of it. Sweet n Low is not a real, organic substance suitable for baking. I can't see why a woman expected to make a custard with low-fat cheese and no eggs.

At this point I have to remember how, given the choice of dining out or having a home-cooked dinner, Tracy will always choose home-cooked, because she thinks I'm the world's best cook.

Mom's been gone for three weeks now. At first the food was fabulous, because Jewish tradition dictates that you must send food to a mourning family, and we had "appetizing", meaning smoked fish and creamy cheeses and bagels and sweet pastries, as much as we wanted and at all times. There was fruit as well, and soda and juices and, after the official mourning period was over, my favorite foods because I didn't and don't want to be challenged by anything. Green fettuccine with pesto. Oriental chicken salad from Eli's. Sushi at home and away.

One thing I've been eating a lot is fresh mozzarella mixed with roasted (but not salted) pistachio meats and dressed with my favorite salad dressing, five garlic cloves to a cup of Extra Virgin Olive Oil to a quarter-cup of low-salt soy sauce. Puree and keep in a covered jar in the refrigerator. Some times I cheer up this salad by putting it on shredded romaine lettuce and sometimes I added a few ripped pieces of prosciutto for protein.

I also made one of the best chicken broths of my life, including four pounds of chicken back, a pound of turkey neck and, almost impossible to find these days, a stewing "fowl", either an old laying hen or a tired-out rooster who had reached the end of its usefulness and, being nothing much more than bones and skin and a bit of too-tough meat, added to the soup pot its wisdom and sinew and long-livedness. The soup was divine and I have been drinking it at every meal like the nectar of life, as if it makes up for that other worn-out, tired being who stopped nurturing me a very long time ago.

My mother fed me very little, over the years. I feed myself far too much. I try to strike a balance between nurturing my daughter and overfeeding her. She's old enough to make her own decisions, mature in a way which I'll probably never be, because she accepts her imperfect mother and is secure and happy in her love.

One out of three ain't bad.

Closed for Bereavement

BERROL--Selma Cantor. Of Manhattan. Beloved wife of Edward Berrol (deceased). Mother of Philip Berroll and Ann Berrol Newman; mother-in-law of Jacalyn Filler and Bruce D. Newman, grandmother of Tracy Newman, Marc Filler-Berroll and Steven Filler-Berroll. Honors graduate of Girls High School (Brooklyn), Hunter College, and the City University of New York's Graduate Center. Professor Emerita at Baruch College, CUNY, and for 25 years Professor of History at same. Official historian of Baruch College. Published works include Getting Back to Business: Baruch College in the City University of New York (Praeger, 1980). Dr. Berrol served as Baruch's Assistant Dean of Liberal Arts for many years, and was the first woman to hold this position.

Delicious Meal at Landmarc T/W

Lamdmarc is a not-very-old restaurant run by a fellow named Marc Murphy. It is in Tribeca and, for people who hang in that nabe, it is considered a sort of a friendly, un-fancy place where a family, a couple or a mere singleton can come in and have a cup of coffee or a full dinner on a slow Tuesday night or perhaps a quiet Saturday.

Landmarc in the Time/Warner Center,which you must know is a vertical shopping mall in Columbus Circle, takes the concept a little higher on the scale. This Landmarc is a mall restaurant.

Like you can't carry your bags one more minutes and the kids are hollering and the old people or non-shoppers in your party are getting that edge to their voices. So you say all right all right and the next thing you know you are seated at a table and there's a drink in your hand and life looks not quite so bad.

In Poughkeepsie, we call that restaurant Red Lobster. It comes with a salad and crayons for the kids, which are only two of the differences between it and Landmarc.

One other difference is not--not really--the price of your meal.

I know...you were expecting me to do that high/low comparison. It's cute, it's classic, but it doesn't actually work here because, accounting for better ingredients and the high cost of NOT being part of a chain, Landmarc's dishes are not priced that differently from the Lob.

I had an appetizer (roasted marrow bones with onion marmalade) and an entree (Roast Chicken) along with San Pellegrino water (I don't drink alcohol, but I can't bear to order a Diet Coke with a thoughtfully-cooked meal). The bill, with a really impressive tip because I liked my waitress, came to $60...about what it comes to for my big salad and appetizer and Tracy's full meal (now that she's off the kiddie menu) at Red Lobster.

At both places, the combination of sticker shock and a full tummy prevented me from ordering dessert.

Now, you know what the primary difference between the meals was. It was the quality of ingredients as well as the fact that Landmarc's menu is chef-driven, while Lobster's menu is customer-driven.

Restaurants like the Lob are in the business of responding to what their customers want. If  Mario Batali's Lardo (pure preserved pig fat, the fat from a fabulous prosciutto ham) suddenly became all the rage among families with 2.5 children and an income between $35,000-$75,000 per annum, the Lobster guys would be out making deals with Oscar Meyer for every scrap of pork fat not already working in a vat of bologna. God alone knows how it would taste or what it would do to the obesity epidemic, but it certainly would be on the menu.

By the same token, when Red Lobster's market starts screaming for, say, coating in bran flakes instead of frying, you will never again see a fried item on their menu. As sacrilegious as it sounds.

(Twenty years ago, a fresh fillet of local fish, lightly grilled, would have been as out-of-place as Eric Ripert on a box of Gorton's of Gloucester. Now, it's a menu leader at the Lob...in some regions of the country).

As I understand it, the menu at a restaurant like Landmarc is made up with the seasonal ingredients, the chef's preference, the style of the restaurant and the wants of the public in mind. There is a certain amount of integrity, if you want to call it that. Maybe it ought to be called thoughtfulness--someone's thinking about something beyond the bottom line and staying in business.

Whatever it is, there's no doubt that it results in better food, much better food, for, as I said, not a great deal more money.

My dinner: I ordered the marrow bones and the roast chicken because I cook for myself so often these days that I wanted to see what professional hands and sources could do with two of my favorites.

When I roast marrow bones at home, I find it is a delicate balance. Do you roast the bones so that the marrow is crispy and not too greasy? If you do that, you could cook the marrow away entirely; a waste of money, although marrow bones don't cost very much. If you are too cautious, you'll get plenty of marrow, but it will be flabby and unappealing and you sure won't digest it easily.

Also, unless you have an x-ray machine or the guarantee of your meat supplier, any marrow bone could be so full of osseous structure (little bones inside the bone) that it could be almost impossible to get the marrow out of it.

Landmarc's plate of marrow bones had three 3" bones (probably from a veal shank, rather than the beef which is all I can find). One of the bonelets was pretty darn osseous, which meant that I managed to drip hot fat on myself as I wrestled to get the marrow out of the bone. One of the bonelets was pretty nearly perfect. The last was quite flabby.

I wondered if they had cooked (or pre-cooked) all the bones at different times, or were there hot and cold spots in the roaster? Anyway, the onion marmalade was wonderful and the country bread (this was also the bread in the basket) unforgettably good. On the whole, though Landmarc hadn't done much better than I, it was still an excellent dish.

They might want to add a parsley salad, as it is served in London. Just a suggestion.

My entree, the Roast Chicken, was something which I hadn't made for myself in a very long time. I hate undercooked chicken, "wet" chicken, flabby chicken skin. When I want to eat chicken, I usually get it from Boston Market and ask them for a "dark one", i.e. one on which the skin in well-done and crispy. All right, so the white meat will be dry; at least the dark meat won't taste like liver.

The plate with which I was presented featured a boned half-breast and a thigh/drumstick section, both from a smallish bird, both without much golden coloring on their yellow skin.

This freaked me so much that I started the dish by dipping a crust of that delicious bread into the sauce first. It was called Dijonnaise on the menu, but there wasn't any mustard tang or bite that I could find...although golden mustard seeds decorated its creamy tan surface. Still, it was a wonderful sauce. The taste filled my mouth the way "Umami" taste is supposed to; a full, rounded, savory note with nuance and interest. The texture of the sauce was light, so it didn't feel stifling or boring; the flavor was an extension of the chicken, and a complement, not a rival.

There was plenty of good chicken stock in that sauce. Maybe it was made from the chicken drippings? Plenty of good fat, but not enough to sicken the modern palate; there was butter, but not cream...or was there?

The rest of the plate consisted of crunchy haricots vert and "smashed" potatoes, probably small Russet potatoes. A sub-note was shallot, of which there was plenty. Michael Ruhlman had said in his "Elements of Cooking" that there is little reason not to substitute shallot for onion in most home recipes, and he's right; I've been doing it myself since January, and it's changed everything around my kitchen. Shallots have a subtlety and depth which onions do not; even when they're raw and spicy and challenging, shallots have no acrid taste, like garlic.

I finished every morsel on that plate.

The chicken was pretty perfect, although, since it was served in sauce, the skin wasn't crispy. Never mind. It was rich and yet unfatty, as if the kitchen had removed a subcutaneous layer of fat with a bicycle pump (don't ask, but there must be a video of Ming Tsai doing it someplace) as they do with ducks. Or maybe the chicken was a very special little chicken, better than what I could get even in Adams' Fairacre market. Landmarc's menu does not "source" every last ingredient, so I don't know.

No dessert, thank you. I couldn't even finish the whole plate of chicken, wisely asking for leg to be wrapped to go (and devouring it five hours later, without that magnificent sauce; it stood up beautifully on its own).

Thank you, Landmarc. I'll keep in touch. Lobster? Only if my Beautiful Daughter insists.

Offally Sorry

The fact is, there are hundreds of memorable meals served every week in New York City.

Some of them are memorable because of the guests and some because of the food. Some are memorable mostly because of the amount of food ingested by the guests--I'm thinking of the "No-holds-barred eating contest which comes off in the summer of 1936" as described by Damon Runyon in his short story, "A Piece of Pie".

Some are memorable because one or another of the guests become "dead meat" in the course of the meal. Chicago and parts of North Jersey do that kind of thing better than we do, but there always are stories about Umberto's Clam Bar, and other locations downtown.

One downtown location held a memorable dinner last week. Here's the story.

The location was The Astor Center. This used to be a liquor store until someone got the hot idea that, since the store was acting as a de facto clearing house of foodie information and lore, not to mention wine tasting and discussions of all things oenophiliac, they might as well rebuild the place as a combination of dining rooms, lecture kitchens, small spaces and library, to host events of interest to the food and wine community. (Read more about it here)

They also hired Lesley Townsend, an experienced and charming impresario, to act as Director of the center.

One of Ms. Townsend's first big spectaculars was held last week. It was a dinner cooked by Chris Cosantino, the San Francisco chef who was such a great competitor in The Next Iron Chef, entirely from offal. (For the Chef's Offal-centric blog, click here)

"Offal" is taken to mean the parts of the animal which are not usually served to paying customers, the idea being that most people will happily trot home with rib, steaks, and even the rump of an animal, but will make squeaky (and possibly gagging) noises when confronted with the liver, the lights, the brains, glands or trotters.

Granted, it's a little more difficult to cook with those ingredients, but even a fine beef steak--sometimes, especially a fine beef steak--profits by a little more preparation than just introducing it to the fire and hoping for the best. Also, offal is offally low in price, if you can get hold of it.

Then there's another point, which Chef Cosantino and Michael Ruhlman (who was at the Astor Center as a sort of master of ceremonies, quizzing the Chef and introducing the various animal parts) have been writing about for most of the last year.

It is this: that, since killing an animal for food is, if not completely reprehensible, at least an act of violence against nature, it is even worse to commit this act and only take about a third of what the animal offers. Still worse, in fact, because this would seem to indicate that at least three times as many animals would have to be killed to feed the same amount of people.

Consentino feels passionately that the full use of a pig, sheep or steer (or any other edible beast) is the best way of honoring its life. He's all in favor of humane farming and slaughtering techniques, too.

I tend to agree with all of this because I am a helpless omnivore and I know I'm going to go on eating all different parts of all different animals for as long as my teeth still work, and this is the only way I'll get out of it if God happens to be a sheep. And hey. YOU don't know.

Gothamist found the dinner interesting, as did Ruhlman, naturally. As for ourselves, we are not in the ranks of people who can spend $250 on dinner and so we did not attend.

But we're going to get matey with a packet of sweetbreads just as soon as Adam's Fairacre Farm get arrange to get it to us. Because God might or might not be a sheep, but we like to play it on the safe side.

Thank You

...For subscribing to the RSS feed of this blog. If, indeed, you do.

It should be clear by this time that I am woefully inept as a scheduled poster. The Internship, the Beautiful Daughter, and many less important things get in the way of my posting regularly and, if you want to read this blog, you might keep checking on it every day and come back very disappointed and possibly loathing me.

But if you've set up an RSS feed, you get a little reminder telling you when I have blogged, and you can click and read or not as you choose.

I would like to thank those of you who have done this by making dinner for you, possibly from Fleischer's, my local boucherie (which was good enough to be mentioned in Saveur magazine's "Top 100" this year. Just saying.)

For this I would have to know all your names, as well as being a dependably good cook. So we'll save the idea for some other time, shall we? but you know the thought is there.

Robert Irvine and Dinner: Embarassing

Chef Robert, a little blurry

Hot off the turgid foodie presses comes the moral story of Chef Robert Irvine, a muscle-bound Brit who seems to have embellished his resume with such attractive but fictional accomplishments as designing a wedding cake for Prince Charles, accepting a knighthood (wouldn't you think they'd keep records of things like that?), and carrying Prince William to classes at University on his massive, ox-like back. Okay, maybe I'm making up that last one.

When the Food Network was taken in by all this, they gave Mr. Irvine his own show called "Dinner: Impossible" (the riotous Bourdain calls it "Dinner: Inconvenient"). The point of the show was to challenge Irvine and his two assistants by having them cater a big meal with limited ingredients.

In other words, it was yet another set-up for disaster, like Iron Chef and Throwdown and so many others: what will happen when the chef fails, as it seems he must?

It might be more interesting to involve Bourdain in one of these shows, because you know his eventual breakdown scene would be more fun than a season of wife-switching. But the actual players of these games--frequently Bobby Flay, whose red hair masks one of the most placid temperaments ever discovered in a chef; Masuhara Morimoto, who would rather fall on his own chef's knife than show any emotion except polite interest, and Mario Batali, as cool as cucumber gelato--rarely lose either the competition or their composure.

Chef Irvine was like that. He might run around and look comically angry, but mostly he did just fine, including proper awe and respect at A. working in a kitchen constructed entirely of ice; B. catering the second inaugural of Pennsylvania Governor Ed "Fast Eddie" Rendell, or C. creating an eighteenth-century dinner for the town elders of Colonial Williamsburg. (I'm just a fool for Colonial Williamsburg).

I can't remember anything particularly yummy about his food, but the local color and the energy of the chef made for a pleasant half-hour or so.

Irvine was also a useful part of the Food TV "family" they keep trying to foist off on us. (You know--beautiful-but-rivalrous Giada and Rachel, corny and horny Aunt Paula, classy Aunt Ina, favorite nephew Guy Fieri, who I really can't stand, and I'm-the-only-normal-one-around-here cousin Alton. Call him Uncle Bob, the relative most likely to lift Aunt Paula over his head and carry her out to the backyard as a show of strength.

So he lied. He's a television personality, not a school bus driver. Exactly what does he have to be?

Yes, it is a good idea for foodie celebrities to be upfront about their actual qualifications, but after you know that Alton has studied video production, food preparation and public speaking, what more do you need srom him--two stages with the Troisgros brothers and a Food Safety Certificate? That wouldn't make him a better Alton. For that matter, does Ed Levine need some kind of documentation to prove that he's the Dean of New York Eats? And why are you reading this blog? I'm going to be a licensed social worker and I am legally allowed to drive in the State of New York, but that doesn't have anything to do with food knowledge, does it?

I say, leave Chef Robert alone. He shouldn't have lied. But he certainly has the PERSONALITY to be on TELEVISION, and what else does he need?

Can You See My New Template?

I can't! Some times it takes 24 hours for a blog to re-publish on its home computer. And I have no idea why that is, either. So pleae tell me (in comments) what you can see here. Thank you for your support.

"Okay, Annie..Just a couple more pixels and we got it."

What Makes a Sushi Joint Bad?

The first point here is that bad fish, fish that could give you an intestinal parasite or a bad case of food poisoning, is not considered bad sushi.

It is considered impossible sushi.

Seriously. If you ever eat sushi which makes you sick, don't ever go back to that purveyor again. It doesn't matter if this was "just once"--if a sushi restaurant ever makes people sick, it has forfeited its right to a second chance.

If you really want to be well-liked on a karmic scale, you might call your local Board of Health and make a complaint as well.

It should be said that I have been eating sushi at least three times a month for the past 27 years, and, although my stomach is not particularly iron-clad, I have never--gulp--so far--knock wood--gotten sick from sushi. And I eat supermarket sushi and Teriyaki Boy sushi.

I make my own sushi at home, of which I can proudly say that the rice tastes good, although nothing like the rice in sushi restaurants. But I never feel that I am capable of detecting "borderline" fish--like the marvelously fresh and plump specimens you see in New York's Chinatown, or in the fish markets out on the boroughs. Fresh and plump, yes, but suitable to be eaten raw? I just don't know. I do indulge in a tuna steak or a salmon fillet from these places, and especially a couple of low-priced lobsters when possible. But I cook these fish pretty thoroughly before I eat them.

In markets where there is an English-speaking person to answer questions, I always ask if any of the fish are sushi grade.

If the person says, "Sure, all of them," then he or she has misunderstood the questions. I have never heard of tilapia being served raw, although I don't know why it shouldn't be--but that's the whole thing--I don't know. Also, it's not possible that all the different types of salmon will be sushi grade; some come from further away than others. Some fish come from enormous fishing boats with cleaning and freezing facilities on board; these are the source of most of the sushi-grade fish you'll find in restaurants or markets. Oh, and I don't think I've ever heard of fresh trout being served as sushi. Or swordfish.

A good fishmonger will say, "The tuna's sushi grade, and the salmon fillet." Or he might say, "Nothing today." Don't argue with the man; he's the pro. Worst comes to worst, you can always boil the shrimp and use that.

Last night my Beautiful Daughter and i want to a new sushi restaurant in the neighboring townlet of Rhinebeck, NY. We had eaten there previously and had found the restaurant, which specializes in "Benihana"-style grillwork as well as sushi, to be a little over-elegant for the town, but the sushi chef was attentive and the sushi itself was very good.

Well, last night was realized that "over elegant" was actually "overextended". Maybe this resto will make a go of it as a hibachi joint--two or three table were filled with chefs flipping beef and customers ooing and ahhing at the show.

The sushi side of the operation was just plain sad. Along with the usual place-settings of soy sauce bowl, chopsticks, chopstick rest and wasabi dish, each seat at the sushi bar featured an individual Glade air freshener candle.

I am not making this up, and I don't even want to belabor the point. Sushi can be very bad without smelling very bad, but restaurants really shouldn't have ANYTHING in them that smells that bad. So the BD and I were a bit shocked, but we hid it well and ordered shrimp sushi and salmon sushi for her, and tuna tartar for me.

Both were okay--that is, they didn't make us sick, and they had a nice presentation--but the fish was nothing special. Not any deep flavor, special seasoning, exceptional richness or mouth feel. It was all very bland--except the seasonings, which were too harsh. It was mere fodder, at about $20 for the lot. And that IS a lot.

Three guys came in and sat next to us, and we started to feel sorry for them. Perhaps they noticed the Glade candles before we did,  but something seemed to make them suspicious before they even ate anything. Was it the fact that all the fish was pre-sliced and saran-wrapped in the fish case? (This means that it's not as fresh as you might like, and that the chef who puts together the sushi is probably not trained well enough to slice the fish himself. Or that the proprietor really, really wants to limit the amounts of fish used per order.) The asked the chef what he recommended, and he said, brightly, "Bass?" Like trout and tilapia, bass is just not a sushi fish--and I thought it was endangered, anyway.

Then the chef asked the guys, "You use wasabi, in your soy sauce?"

The guys said, "Doesn't that destroy the taste of the fish?"

Well, it does, actually. And we all ought to know that. Especially those of us who are, you know, professional sushi chefs.

By that time Tracy and I were finished with our dinner, so we were leaving. We felt the other patrons might be close behind us.

So this is how a sushi restaurant fails--and, incidentally, how it succeeds, as well. Of course the fish is going to be fresh; that's not even a point. The restaurant also needs to have an imaginative and well-trained chef, access to fish which actually tastes good, and an absence of objects which give the impression that without them you'd be keeling over from the stink of the joint.

I don't think that's actually too much to ask.