Kotobuki

I'm back in the black: tonight I had a dinner rich in flavor that didn't significantly add to my ballooning top-100-restaurant-inflated credit card bill. After an evening at work that crept into the late evening, I headed to Kotobuki, quite possibly the only sushi restaurant I've ever been to where the price and quality were inversely related (in the best of ways). With Beatles in the background, bright lighting, friendly service, Japanese regulars dropping in, and the guy next to me reading a book about pirates to his daughter, it felt like a neighborhood diner.

I began with a Sapporo which quickly became more interesting than my book. The environment is almost reminiscent of a college-town pizza joint: people coming in and out, chatting with their company and the staff, for takeout; friends getting together for a quick meal; and all the furnishings charmingly dingy.

I began with the steamed shrimp shumai, an item from which I baseline how good I think the rest of the dinner will be. These are sometimes small and chewy or lacking flavor, which presages the subsequent plates, but these had dense povitica-style dumpling sheet layers rich in shrimp, served with a side of spicy mustard.

I ordered three pieces of nigiri sushi: flounder, mackerel, and sea urchin (uni), which was the most unnerving thing I've eaten since that fish eye. I was less adventurous with the maki sushi rolls, ordering eel and tuna/avocado.

In case you're wondering whether sea urchin has the appearance, consistency, and color of a human tongue and if it slowly falls apart in a gelatinous disaster when you pick it up, it does.

To cap things off and because I had accidentally checked an incorrect sushi roll box (the urchin was no mistake), I ordered a spicy scallop roll. Unlike spicy rolls elsewhere, it was legitimately spicy and in place of flavor-masking spicy mayonnaise, was liberally sprinkled with powdered pepper flakes. Number 38, check.