Well lit at Samurai Boston

You may wonder (or perhaps not) how I choose which restaurants to write about. Does it depend on the type of cuisine? The cost? The creativity of the menu?

Is it all an elaborate cover-up to mask thrice-weekly visits to Texas Roadhouse?

Actually, it's much simpler: Did I get decent photos?

See, it's one thing to write about the food: how it smelled, how it tasted, whether it was satisfying. But the visual aspect is a huge factor for me, so it's something I like to share. And I'd prefer not to show you muddy or blurry shots that don't do anything to communicate the look of the plate and give you a sense of the experience.

Which is why, despite repeat visits over the past couple of years, I've never written about Samurai Boston, a Japanese-Korean restaurant on Boylston (right next door to the Apple store).

It's a long, narrow, basement space with a small bar at one end and a sushi bar at the other, and tables lined along the wall. The staff is young and cool, the music is varied (last night it was The Killers and Weezer), and diners are a mix of Japanese students, office workers, and hip twenty-somethings.

Usually we get a table against the wall, where the lighting is low. Last night, however, we were lucky: the place was full. So we had a choice of waiting for a table or sitting at the (well-lit) sushi bar. Easy choice.



Samurai Boston has a nice collection of sake and soju. And the glassware is lovely.



The blue indentation in the carafe is filled with ice, so it keeps the sake cool without diluting it. Love. That.

We tend to get the same things each time we go to Samurai (so I don't feel as bad about not telling you about it earlier). Always on our list are the thin-sliced beef tongue, broiled and salted, over a bed of greens:



and the grilled yellowtail collar, with a crispy skin and fatty, deeply flavorful meat (and also a good test of chopstick skills if you can pull all the fish out from between the bones):



This time we also tried some new stuff. First, fresh, briny oysters with sweet ponzu sauce:



And then takoyaki, griddled balls of sticky dough filled with octopus and topped with shaved bonito:



And then ... "What's ankimo?" we asked our waiter.

"Oh, that's monkfish liver. It's kind of like ... cheese, maybe?"

Cheese?

"Well, kind of soft, but with a fishy taste."

Uhhh ...

"Actually, it's sort of like foie gras."

Fishy foie gras? Sign us up!

It was certainly very pretty.



And indeed it was a lot like foie gras in texture: soft, creamy, very rich. The flavor was both fish and liver, but not overwhelmingly either. Not cod-liver-oil intense, but a milder and very lovely level below it. Definitely one of those why-have-I-not-tried-this-before? moments.



At some point we might make it past the first page of appetizers on the menu and try out something else; Samurai Boston has a lot of Japanese and Korean dishes, and I always end up coveting whatever the people at the next table are eating.

Oh! And I just saw that the desserts on Samurai's dinner menu include cassata! Okay, that's a definite for next time.

And I'll make sure it's well-lit. Promise.

Raw fish candy time!

One of the downsides of cancer treatment is that certain yummy things are off-limits, particularly those that could carry a risk of food-borne disease. These include raw veggies that aren't easy to wash well (raspberries, lettuce, etc), as well as lovely raw things like oysters and sushi.

Luckily, today I discovered a solution to the latter.



It's candy! From Japan! That magically turns water and chemicals into cutely realistic, teeny-tiny tamago, naguro and ikura!!

Did I mention it's from Japan?

New pre-game ritual: Basho

It's hard to get a table anywhere around Fenway on a game night, and harder still to find a non-sports-bar option.

I should rephrase that. Past tense. It used to be hard, but now there's Basho.

We walked in early on a Saturday night before a game. The weather was sticky and oppressive; Basho was cool and fresh, green and bamboo-y.



It was also empty, and at first we thought it wasn't open. But no; it's just that most people either don't know it's there or actually prefer a 20-minute wait for clam chowder and chili dogs at Remy's on an 80-degree day. Hey, it's a free country.

We had Japanese yam tempura, and — because I'd just read about a similar, doubtless more heavy-handed version cropping up at state fairs — avocado tempura.



There were deep-fried balls of crispy sushi rice topped with spicy tuna:



There were tiger rolls: eel and cucumber with salmon and squid, topped off with salmon roe, a lovely balance of textures and flavors:



And. There was. The. Steamed. Pork. Bun.



Not the usual filled nikuman, these were more like sliders: hand-sized and stuffed with sweet, fatty Korobuta pork and lightly pickled cucumber. It was good.

So good that when I went to lunch at Basho with work friends last week, I ordered the same thing. And they were still awesome.

The bento lunch boxes looked pretty good, too:



The one downside at lunch was slow, slow service. A 20-minute wait for food is not good when you only get a half-hour break. And when they messed up an order, it took another 15 for them to bring the right thing (which they at least comped, with many apologies).

I hope they work out the lunchtime glitches, because it would be a very civilized alternative to the desk-sandwich.

Last Basho bit: we were back there this week to celebrate a much-loved co-worker who is leaving for Denver (sob!).

The sadness at her departure was leavened by Basho's insanely good chicken balls, which are light, studded with vegetables, and coated with teriyaki sauce. I know I wasn't the only one wondering how many I could eat without drawing attention to myself, and whether more would be forthcoming once the plate was empty.



Basho is a huge space; for each of the visits mentioned here, we were in a different part of the restaurant. As well as the bar, dining room, and semi-private area with a 17-seater table, there's a sushi bar and a more private room.

It's big enough that the chances of not getting a table, even on a Saturday night in August, are highly unlikely.

In other words, there's no reason to stand outside anymore.

Otherworldly sushi in Boston? O ya!

The Boy turned F-Word this past birthday; he sailed into it much more gracefully than I did. To celebrate, we checked out o ya, the sushi sensation that allegedly has people commuting up from New York for dinner.

Those who claim Boston is superior to NYC must be delighted to have evidence to back up their belief.

I made the reservation through OpenTable, which meant we were at the chef's bar (reserving one of their six tables is only possible by calling).

This turned out to be the best option, as we got to watch o ya's three chefs at work in their tiny space, creating incredible dishes using only veryveryvery sharp knives, a blowtorch and an electric whisk. Oh, and insanely fresh and fabulous ingredients.

I've had sea urchin before, but I'd assumed it was an acquired taste. How could anyone truly enjoy something that tasted as though it had sat in a tidepool on Revere Beach for three days?

The sea urchin at o ya, however, made me realize I just hadn't had fresh uni. This wasn't Revere Beach; it was a deserted Polynesian island. It was amazing.

The other surprise was the onsen egg. Apparently this is a relatively common preparation in Japan—onsen means hot springs, and eggs can be slow-cooked in the water—but it was a revelation to us.

When I think poached egg, I think runny yolk. But here, the yolk was just-just-just cooked; enough to hold together, but still soft, almost custardy. And warm. And topped with wafer-thin slices of pickled garlic.

How good was it? It actually made me cry. Thanks a lot, o ya.

In all, we had:

Kumamoto oyster
watermelon pearls, cucumber mignonette



Diver scallop
sage tempura, olive oil bubbles, meyer lemon



Scottish salmon belly
cilantro, ginger, hot sesame oil drizzle

Peruvian-style tuna toro tataki
aji panca sauce, cilantro pesto

Shima aji & sea urchin
ceviche vinaigrette, cilantro



Warm eel
thai basil, kabayaki, fresh Kyoto sansho

Onsen egg
dashi sauce, truffle salt, homemade pickled garlic

Porcelet tonkatsu
seared foie gras, cabbage shiso slaw, dashi apple sauce, hojiso

House-smoked moullard duck tataki
foie gras kabayaki, arima sansho

Foie Gras
balsamic chocolate kabayaki, raisin cocoa pulp, sip of aged sake

Everything was excellent, although (what?) ... the meat dishes weren't as fantastic as the fish. The smoked duck took a lot of chewing; maybe that was more noticable because we'd had several plates of melt-in-the-mouth tender ingredients beforehand. The pork was delicious, but no more amazing (it seemed) than pork anywhere else.

But the last item—the foie gras with chocolate—more than made up for it, especially with the taste of 8-year-old sake (with the color and depth of port).

I made a video. Wanna see? Goes like this:



The only thing I felt bad about was the prep-to-consumption-time ratio; we'd watch as the chef sliced fish with meticulous precision, bathed it in marinade, chose the right kind of plate on which to delicately place the fish, sliced another ingredient, layered them and topped them with tiny, measured amounts of garnishes, and finished them with a spoonful of something from a sizzling pan.

And then our waiter would bring the finished dish to us. And we'd go nom. Nom. And the chef's intense, focused artwork would have disappeared.

I think we'll be going back. O ya.