Japanese
Genki Ya in Brookline: the worst Japanese restaurant flub ever
Hell is not bad food.
It’s other people. Specifically, hostile servers. After an atrocious experience at Brookline’s Genki Ya, I’m trying to pick apart the mess.
When I was 16, I was a cashier at my local A & P. Old ladies with tubes in their noses would squawk if a box of crackers rang up 20 cents higher, demanding that I follow them into the aisles to see the price sign. (They usually had misread it.) Soccer moms would mutter mild abuses about my incompetence as if I was wasn’t human. I was there once too. I sympathize.
But some servers have made me cry with frustration. There was pimply-faced one who worked for Western dining chain Wagas in Shanghai (Wagas Citic Square branch, August 8th 2009) who outright lied to escape his screwup, capping off a troubled relationship with China’s service culture. I wrote an incensed email to the chain but never received a reply. Some servers are merely incompetent – forgetting, dropping, blundering – and I tend to just feel sorry for them.
But sometimes there are spectacular front-of-house failures that deserve a writeup all their own. These require repeated, concerted level of incompetence that is really just embarrassing for everyone involved.
There’s a “normal accident” theory that arises in trying to explain tragedies. In these cases, there are many small mistakes. Each of these mistakes alone are normally not a big deal, but it’s the coincidental alignment of them that spells a lost customer.
So let’s explain my disastrous meal at Genki Ya, a small sushi restaurant that bills itself as all-organic. I’d eaten there before and enjoyed the food, so returned with boyfriend in tow.
We wandered in on a Friday night. It was busy, but not so busy since we were seated within two minutes at the sushi bar. I was faint with hunger; he was inured to the world after a week of hell and insomnia. We planned on ordering omakase – sit at the sushi bar, give the chef a budget, and let him/her pick whatever was fresh.
I swear I’m not making ordering omakase up.
We ask for omakase at $50 for the two of us. Blank stare from the waitress. We explain in plain English what it means. Outright refusal. “They’re too busy,” she says.
“Too busy? All they have to do is choose something,” I say.
“They’re too busy,” she repeats, as if we’ve asked for something particularly distasteful.
Desperate with hunger, and somewhat stubborn, I have an inkling she is not Japanese.
I speak to her in Chinese, explaining the concept of omakase in our secret-Asian-people-language-club tongue. I’m right, but am met again with cold refusal.
My dining partner and I look beseechingly at the men making maki behind the counter. They seem friendly. We try to undermine the servers. It’s beginning to feel like a CIA mission. No luck.
Meanwhile, I’m lightheaded with hunger. Our waitress has abandoned us. We finally get another waitress, who we repeat the same request to. Refusal again.
We’re floundering. Finally, after more hand wringing, the manager comes over, who nods several times, and says he’ll send over miso soup. We rejoice since we’re finally going to get the meal we asked for – or so we thought.
Masa’s in Porter Square Exchange Mall serves some really awful sushi
Being the kind-of-poor college student I am, I’m a huge fan of cheap food. Really cheap food. Under ten dollars for dinner, say.
But I am not a fan of really crappy food. Especially not bad sushi. It makes the sushi-lover inside of me cry. My only consolation was that my non-sushi-eating-friend thought it was reasonable, and was not turned off of the concept of sushi altogether. If only he knew the true joys of unagi!
The sushi in question was found at Masa’s Sushi Bar in Porter Square Exchange Mall, replacing the old Kotobukiya Sushi Bar. There used to be a Kotobukiya grocery store here as well, but they were driven out by the university demons that be to make room for a Lesley bookstore.
I think this incident points to the questionable judgments of Yelpers at times. They didn’t mention that the shrimp on my scorpion roll ($7.50) would be like a stringy strip of limp cardboard. Or that the unagi nigiri (eel), normally a no-fail mouthful of melty deliciousness, wouldn’t be heated through, flavorful, or cut from a particularly unchoice part of the fish. Well, it was only $1.50 per piece.
At least it didn’t cost me very much.
Scorpion Roll at Masa's Sushi Bar
Eel nigiri at Masa's
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Find it!
1815 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tim Cushman’s O Ya in Boston – The Best Meal of My Life
I heard O Ya, Boston’s premiere sushi restaurant, was absolutely superb. I’d heard raves. It was supposed to be an exotic, transcendental experience. It was supposed to push the boundaries of what sushi is. “Get the hamachi with banana pepper mousse,” one friend told me. Another moaned when recalling the fried oyster with squid ink foam, with a similarly moan inducing price tag.
It’s life changing, I’ll-never-eat-sushi-again kind of sushi. Each grain of rice is perfect, instilled with a richness and nuance of flavor I didn’t know rice could hold. Each nigiri is as precisely constructed as a Swiss timepiece and balanced in flavors, and oh, the flavors, the flavors! – ingredients I’d never seen used in sushi before, with a fondness for black truffle, aioli, and smoky pickled onion. With each bite (and they only give you one bite at a time), fireworks went off, every single time, I cried, “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
I had never really thought about how fish and rice go so well together, but this was the first time I was dumbstruck by this basic fact. Sushi and rice formed a holy communion – they melted together, melded together, moved together. The fish was so fresh it seemed not like fish at all, but a kind of ecclesciastical butter, something that could lubricate the movement of heavens, or convince atheists in the existence of God. The only problem with each artfully made bite was how how tragically quickly it melted away into the paleness of a memory.
The climb to the top included a nigiri made with house smoked wagyu beef – but not just any beef. This beef melted in my mouth like it was freshly caught fish, and astounded me with its smoky richness. I was afraid to swallow. I got lost. I closed my eyes. I shaded my eyes with a open palm, as if the sun was shining in my eyes, unsure what was happening or what I was tasting. I didn’t think anything could top it until I hit even the very last bite – foie gras with balsamic chocolate kabayaki, raisin cocoa pulp, and a sip of aged sake. It was perched on top of a roll of rice, and as the crowning achievement of a spectacular meal, it caused me to cover my face with my hands and moan, head bowed, at a loss for words. My shoulders slumped in defeat. I don’t even normally like foie gras that much. I don’t normally get bowled over by sushi. I don’t normally write such fawning reviews. Amazing.
I walked around post-dinner in Chinatown and couldn’t really bring myself to buy a snack anywhere else. No joke, all other kinds of food seemed distant and unpalatable.
O Ya, opened by chef Tim Cushman and his sake sommelier wife Nancy, is hidden on a bare, deserted street in the Leather District (rubbing shoulders with Chinatown). I got off South Station and no one had heard of “East Street.” I wandered, legs bare and freezing, until a taxi cab driver finally pointed me in the right direction. I spotted the modest sign and plain wooden door, not sure what to expect from such an unassuming location.
I took a seat, and immediately wished I’d skipped the VIP tables and reserved a bar stool instead where I could watch the food being made. Unfortunately, they were booked for the evening. My own 5:30pm Saturday reservation had been made weeks in advance – if I’d insisted on getting a 7pm, it would have a month and a half to snag a prime dining time. Our waitress was competent and professional, if not extremely warm.
By now, I’ve developed a shameless routine when I eat out. I get my Nikon camera out, set up the tripod, set the white balance, and snap a few test shots to figure out the light. The women sitting to our right kept glancing over, amused:
The first dish of the evening was a kumamoto oyster, tiny pearls of watermelon, and cucumber mignonette, slightly sweet and briney.
Next came a hint of the delight of what would come: hamachi with banana pepper mousse. Cushman is fond of torching.
Then salmon tataki with torched tomato, smoked salt, and onion aioli. Another stunner of a bite – the smoked salt and onion flavors made it a knockout.
One of my favorite things in the world is unagi, and this warm eel unagi with thai basil, kabayaki, and fresh Kyoto sansho is no exception. The melding of Thai and Japanese flavors added an unexpected twist on an already unbelievably rich bite.
An example of of how incredibly inventful the food can be: warm chive blossom omelette, sweet dashi sauce, hajiso.
One of my favorites included this fried kumamoto oyster, yuzu kosho aioli, and squid ink bubbles – actually made with a froth of oyster juice, squid ink, olive oil and milk.
A la ratte potato chip with summer truffle.
Hamachi with Vietnamese mignonette, thai basil, and fried shallots – incredibly fresh, love the melding of Japanese and Vietnamese flavors here.
Wild bluefin tataki, smoky pickled onion, truffle oil. Off the hook.
An amazing vegetarian dish of grilled sashimi of chanterelle and shittake mushrooms, rosemary garlic oil, sesame froth, and homemade soy. Each delicate bite made me rethink the taste of mushrooms.
Wagyu beef nigiri that… almost made me pass out from joy. Amazing.
The finale – a seared bite of foie gras, flavored with balsamic vinegar, chocolate, and raisins. You would never think that combination would work, but the names of the ingredients are really good predictions of success at O Ya.
I’m happy to say that O Ya lived up to the hype in every way. Best sushi of my life.
Freshly caught, homemade sushi
There are several kinds of people you meet at Harvard, and Willy is the type who is utterly dedicated to his one central passion in life: fishing. He writes articles about fishing for national magazines, he goes on fishing expeditions, he takes classes involving fish, he takes care of fish at a museum, and he’s bartering with the convenience store across the street with fish. He has so much extra fish that he gives the dining hall dozens of pounds of the stuff every week, so they know and love him there.
Willy and his catch
Recently, he’s been hosting sushi parties where he’ll cut up his catch and serve it nigiri style with sugared and vinegared rice, wasabi, and soy sauce. It’s amazing how much sushi one tuna produces, and needless to say, he was knocking on doors afterwards giving the rest of his haul away.
It was interesting to eat since there was a heartfelt simplicity and story to the meal, and a certain bareness: raw fish that my friend had caught with his own hands, rice, soy sauce, all eaten in a dorm common room. Sushi had gone from being somewhat impenetrable to almost too real, with unshaped flaps of the deep pink flesh piled in a dining hall salad plate and seeing my friend’s hands packing a log of rice with the heat still rising from the bowl.
So fresh it’s wriggling: Sushi at Fish Market in Allston
I found Fish Market on Yelp as a budget-priced option for sushi in Allston, and it didn’t disappoint. Prices are very reasonable – $3.75-6 for standard maki and $7.50-15 for “special” maki. The interior is cutesily modern: lime green chairs and light wood, with a merely 5 tables or so plus a sushi bar. Since I was surrounded by Asian staff, I suddenly wanted to burst out in my restaurant Chinese… but here, they all speak English.
The real standout of the night was the baked spicy scallop maki ($8). Oh. My. God. See bottom right – the topping is still-warm scallop, crabstick, and scallop with spicy mayo, complementing the super fresh, creamy avocado roll underneath. If you like your sushi occasionally uber-creamy and decadent, this is the roll for you.
I had dinner with a friend, now a consultant for Oliver Wyman, and his roommate, a professional poker player. Really. The poker player was planning a jaunt out to Vegas at some point and mused about a game in London that required a $20,000 buy in. He also did an admirable job of explaining how to count cards in blackjack: basically, as the game wears on, the deck is rated on a 1-12 scale as light (mostly low cards) or heavy (mostly high cards). Then bets can be made accordingly, although it’s still not a certain win. “It’s not worth it,” he concluded, with the wins from poker far better. He also knew a 16 year old also played the poker circuit, making and losing hundreds of thousands.
It seems like quite the lifestyle: “I’d drop $200 on dinner everyday,” he admitted, also throwing cash at bottle service in clubs. (Club girls were trashy, suprise!) He called the yellowtail out on being sliced too thickly:
“What’s the most you’ve ever earned in a single night?” I asked him.
“About $70,000,” he said.
I suddenly wanted to learn how to play poker.
