Don't Try This at Home?

One of the coolest places in all of New Jersey is the Mitsuwa Japanese Marketplace in Edgewater. I'm trying to think of something you can't get there, and I'm coming up blank. There's an amazing produce section that offers nothing but prime specimens and includes enough imported fruits and vegetables to set my heart aflutter. There are shelves packed with all kinds of rice, condiments, tea, seaweed, and other dry good(ie)s, plus a vast sake section (which really should come with a person to help us neophytes make sense of all the choices). There are huge cases of fresh, vibrant-looking meats. There are even more cases of sashimi-grade seafood, from familiar varieties (salmon, tuna) to more esoteric choices (salted herring roe) to the just plain decadent (a big box of sea urchin that I wanted to scoop into my mouth as I shopped). And then there's the food court, which boasts a ramen house, a gyoza stand, a sushi bar, a cream puff shop, a tonkatsu counter, and a pasta station.

A pasta station? Hey, we're still in Jersey.

I had been to Mitsuwa once before, solo, but this was Margy's maiden voyage. Her eyes grew wide as we entered. It was a bustling Sunday afternoon, so rubbing elbows with everyone else was unavoidable, but we didn't mind. All the activity simply added to the impression that we had actually arrived in Tokyo.

Margy did hone in pretty quickly on the one thing Mitsuwa seems to lack: a gift shop. But I'm not sure we turned every stone -- there may be one back there someplace. Plus apparently there's an ordinance in the area about selling certain goods on Sunday, so the aisles and aisles of rice cookers and other fun-looking appliances were kept under wraps. We'll be back, and we'll find the gift shop. Anyway, there was an enormous sweets counter that held every imaginable variety of candy and cake, many of which looked too precious and ornate to eat (and some of which, I'm sure, would be too shocking to the western palate to enjoy, as has been my experience with Japanese desserts). That stuff would make great gifts, depending on the recipient.

The first thing we did was eat lunch -- gyoza and fried rice with a tiny cup of broth and a small daikon-and-seaweed salad. This good-sized meal was $6.95 (Margy and I ordered the same thing), and it was delicious and had been made to order. After lunch we took a walk by the river, and it sometimes seemed like we could toss a pebble and hit the west side of Manhattan.

When our stroll was complete, we returned to Mitsuwa to shop.

It wasn't easy to stop. I felt an electric current of adrenaline as I picked through things I'd never seen before, never even heard of. I grabbed some new stuff, some of the usual, some "eureka!" favorites, some things I had no idea what to do with. We bought two tiny yuzu fruits. We bought Japanese tofu. We longed for a knobby root of fresh wasabi, but it was $99.99 a pound and we put it back. We agreed that tonight we'd have sashimi at home, at our kitchen table, which we'd never even considered before.

Back at the ranch, the buzz of discovery continued into the evening. Among our purchases were four kinds of produce that were new to our kitchen: yuzu (citrus fruit), myoga (a mild gingerlike bulb), mitsuba (an herb that sort of falls between parsley and celery), and mizuna (a slender salad green). What the hell was I going to do with these things?

First I made some sashimi dipping sauces, including a riff on ponzu that used the zest and juice of the yuzu plus soy sauce and grated ginger. I'll tell you, those little fruits are stingy, with a yuzu about the size of a small plum yielding maybe two teaspoons of juice. But this juice was transporting -- it was a familiar flavor, but it was exotic at the same time, possessing a sharpness and a bitterness that distinguished it from other citruses. For a bit of our beloved heat, I mixed up some wasabi from a powder that my sister had given me, and I used Sriracha sauce to make a chile-ginger dip. I used the other produce in a salad and whipped up a sesame-yuzu dressing. (I was going to squeeze every last drop from those four-dollar fruits.)

Meanwhile, I had a second course in mind to follow the sashimi: the famous black cod with miso. If I'm not mistaken, Margy and I had eaten this dish only once, during our sole visit to Nobu, and it vaulted right to legendary status in our food memories. Sweet, salty, fatty, with a bit of crispy skin -- it was a perfect food, great fun to eat. A few years ago I tried making a version with salmon -- I got the recipe from Nobu's cookbook -- and we both found it a little sweet. This, after marinating, and obsessing over, it for two days. In the years since, I've noticed black cod with miso on just about every Japanese menu, but I believe it's still considered Nobu's signature dish. Today, since I'd found actual black cod at Mitsuwa, I tried a "quick version" recipe from the wonderful Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh, which calls for -- guess what? -- yuzu peel. The cod was marinating as I got the sashimi ready.

Now, I have tried my best over the years to cultivate a certain kitchen fearlessness, with "Why not?" as my motto. Can an Italian-American punk from Jersey make a real Indian curry? Why not? Can he steam a chicken the Chinese way? Why not! But suddenly, in the simple act of slicing raw fish, I was losing my nerve, feeling like I somehow had no right to do what I was doing. All because of tradition.

It's a dream of mine to be a sushi chef. And sushi chefs in training don't get to make sushi for years. For the first, say, 24 months or so, they scrub the wooden bar. Once they've gained proper respect for their surroundings, they begin learning to make rice, which takes a long time to master. Only after they've perfected the rice, way down the line, do they get to begin to use a knife. And so it goes, give or take -- and now here I am, catapulting myself light years ahead to the fish-slicing part, and I haven't even washed the table. I felt like I was intruding.

But I wasn't about to stop, so I even dared to try to arrange our sashimi platter with a little bit of clumsy flair. I laid out little piles of sweet shrimp (amaebi), with rows of tuna and yellowtail, plus thin rings of Japanese cucumber and stacks of julienned myoga. The yellowtail was particularly uncooperative and fell apart a bit, but it made it to the plate successfully.

And then, next thing we knew, we were eating sashimi in our kitchen. All of the fish were of top-notch freshness. The shrimp were creamy and melted in our mouth, the tuna was tender and clear tasting, and the yellowtail was firm and briny. The ponzu sauce definitely represented a step up in complexity as opposed to plain soy sauce. I look forward to benefiting from the skills of a real sushi chef in the near future, but this experience was aces in terms of kitchen empowerment. Plus it was downright delicious, not to mention wildly entertaining. And the black cod came out beautifully -- thanks to an amazing piece of fish, a shriveled but powerful citrus fruit, and a wise Japanese chef and teacher.

Sweet (and Slightly Salty) Relief

"I need sushi. It's been long enough."

Margy had been hearing some variation on those words for a couple weeks now, and it was time to do something about it. So we made a reservation at Shumi, our favorite Japanese restaurant in Jersey.

I was ready to go all out. We took a seat at the bar, and, with Margy's permission, I asked the chef/owner, Ike, to just start feeding us. "We like everything," I said, and I meant it. After a soft-shell crab salad took the edge off ever so slightly, Ike presented us with a magnificent plate of sashimi as a prelude to the sushi that would follow.

Each fish made us swoon. Clockwise from top left: white tuna; toro; Japanese horse mackerel, or aji, dressed with a wonderful mince of ginger and scallion; tai, a sea bream that's somewhat similar to red snapper; sweet shrimp from Maine, the first of the season and tonight's special; and squid that Ike scored with a knife and rolled around seaweed, spicy tuna, and cucumber.

What followed were greatly conflicting impulses to devour it all on the spot and slow down to a crawl in order to savor every morsel. I didn't want the moment to end. After the sashimi, as a parade of sushi began, with Ike handing Margy and me two pieces each at a time until we reluctantly asked him to stop, I was struck with one of the reasons why a meal of sushi and sashimi is among my very favorites: It's an ephemeral experience.

And in so many ways. Take, for instance, the pieces of seared salmon with spicy cilantro dressing that Ike gave us near the end of the feast. These hit just about every note that sushi can sing, and in perfect harmony -- the char on the border of the fish gave it wonderful smoky flavor, while the uncooked interior was briny tasting and refreshing, with the perfect meaty but tender texture. The dressing tingled on the tongue. And the rice was just right, meaning it wasn't tightly packed and had a presence of its own. One piece of sushi offered all this -- but there was only one piece for each of us. Sure, we could have said, "Ike, do that again!" But what would we have missed? Seared white tuna with sriracha sauce? That would have been a crime.

So the pleasure of each incredible bite was fleeting, and the wonder of the whole meal was fleeting too, since it's just not possible for us to eat like this every day, or even every week. And though a good sushi meal is supremely satisfying, it also comes with a certain lightness when it's all over, which only contributes to the bittersweet feeling. After I eat a good steak, I feel full and don't want anything more than maybe a nip of brown liquor and a couple bites of dessert. After I eat a good sushi meal, I'm thinking, I could do that again RIGHT NOW. I know it's time to stop -- my wallet knows, at least -- but I want to continue, and the feeling lingers. I would say my number one, taken-for-granted eating rule is to keep things varied, yet for years I've noticed that when I have a memorable sushi meal, I invariably wake up the next day wanting to eat the stuff again. I think it's addictive.

A Fun Way to Get Hungry for Sushi

Happy birthday to me. Margy and I came up with a grand, blissfully elemental plan to celebrate my special day: We would look at sea creatures, and then we would eat sea creatures.

So we drove down to Camden on this gorgeous afternoon and spent a few hours at the aquarium, gazing at the seahorses, the seals, the sharks, the hippos. Yes, the hippos, Camden's aces in the hole. I'm not sure I'd ever hung out with hippos before, but I think I would remember if I had. Two enormous specimens live at the aquarium, and they're something to behold. You can watch them underwater through what must be very thick glass. The water is beyond murky and you think you'll never be able to see a thing, but then this massive gray blob begins to float by and come into focus, and what do you know -- it's a hippopotamus! Their skin looks like elephant hide, all wrinkled folds, and they seem positively prehistoric. And of course they're very charismatic. One of them played with a huge blue ball -- slowly -- for a few minutes right in front of us. I recommend paying them a visit if you're even in the Camden/Philly area. Tell them Margy and I say hi.

After hanging out with all these fish and the like, we figured it was time to eat some. I had found two good sushi joints in that area months ago, so tonight we made a reservation at Sagami, a great little place that's set, like most Jersey sushi restaurants, on a fast-moving stretch of commercial highway. Once you're inside, though, the setting is very serene and charming, and the kimono-dressed servers make you feel comfortable.

The sushi is simple and fresh, and Sagami makes the greatest fried oysters I've ever had. You can practically see how crunchy they are. They're dressed with tangy tonkatsu sauce, and after the initial crunch they explode with the juicy, creamy, briny essence of oyster. I could have eaten four orders myself, and I wouldn't have even needed a birthday cake. Just stick a candle in an oyster, and let's party.

Shumi Shows Me the Way

Sushi-loving New Jerseyans, take note: Shumi, in Somerville, is awesome.

Yes, it occupies a couple of modest windowless rooms at the back of a small, charmless office building, but that's where the criticism ends. The food is wonderful. On our first visit, Margy and I sat at the bar and let the chef feed us what was best that day. We cut no corners and ate a lot, and the bill was pretty big. This time, we sat at a table and ordered from the menu, and though we didn't get treated to things like a progressive tuna tasting from lean to fatty to superfatty, or a few pieces of "the best part of the salmon," we cut way back on the expense and still got to enjoy the freshest, most perfect fish we've been able to find in NJ.

In terms of the nigiri sushi, the tuna and yellowtail were tender and flavorful. At lots of middling restaurants, the fish will have only one of these characteristics, at best, though I find texture to be a little more reliable than flavor. For instance, there's a place in our town where the fish is fresh and usually pretty tender (at least the items that are supposed to be tender, as some things should be firmer or chewier). But the flavor: nonexistent. Last time I ate there I ordered a bunch of different fish, and not one of them brought my mind to the sea. Not one. I won't go back. Conversely, you'll sometimes find, say, a piece of yellowtail that actually tastes like yellowtail, but then you're still chewing it three minutes later.

Shumi finds the balance, seemingly without trying. My guess is that the chefs have a trustworthy supplier and know how to choose the best specimens on offer -- I assume it's as simple as that. Here the most fun part of our nigiri assortment was a little mackerel medley. That's straight-up, sardinelike mackerel (top left), milder Spanish mackerel (top right), and melt-in-your-mouth Japanese horse mackerel (middle right, with a dollop of green topping, which I believe was scallion and ginger). Everything was perfect, and our pieces of spicy squid tentacle sushi (top middle, just below the two mackerels) were the ideal end note, though of course we couldn't resist a little mochi ice cream for dessert.

Go to Shumi.

Simple, Perfect

Just one question: Is the little green strip of fake grass really necessary?

Sagami, Collingswood, NJ

A Nice Plate of Fish

We're really digging the newest sushi joint in town. Tonight it saved me from having to cook while sating my burning desire for raw fish and rice. I'll be back in the saddle tomorrow, though!

After a wonderfully tender octopus sunomono starter, plus some hijiki seaweed and shrimp gyoza, Margy and I had (more or less from top to bottom):

* Salmon skin roll
* Eel and avocado roll
* Salmon sushi
* Tuna sushi
* Sweet shrimp sashimi
* Yellowtail sushi
* Alaska roll (salmon, avocado, cucumber, masago)

Yes, this seems to be a place where it's best to stick to the basics, but that's fine by me. The fish is very fresh, and so far the restaurant is 3-for-3. Will it settle into sushi complacency after a stellar opening run like the other Japanese restaurants in town? I hope not, but time will tell.

First Sushi of 2006

We are not masochists; sometimes we let someone else do the work.