Boston Restaurant and Food Blog » Japanese

Genki Ya in Brookline: the worst Japanese restaurant flub ever

Lingbo Li — Fri, 28 May 2010 03:01:00 +0000

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.

I drink my bowl of miso soup dry. Then comes a plate piled high with seaweed salad, delicious. Our entrees arrive – there’s a full size roll of eel and tempura maki, as well as “volcano roll” which involves a pyramid of rolls doused in tempura, crab, and mayo. Great. Enough food to get us full. Or so we thought.

A few minutes later, a waitress arrives with two more full size rolls. They’re highly Americanized rainbowed concoctions, and tasty. We have enough food for 4 people now. Our paces slows.

This must be it, right?

No. Another roll, topped with spicy tuna and filled with shrimp tempura arrives. We laugh. This is gluttony, this is madness. That must be it, right? We laugh a little, too tired and beaten down to care. The couple next to us starts to joke about it too.

We’re now clocking in at 5 oversized rolls, each of which takes up a platter.

It’s not enough, clearly.

Roll 6 and 7′s arrival feel like mockery, a cruel fulfillment of getting what you ask for. By this point, eat bite feels like tasting the thick slap of an insult.

The man behind the sushi bar awkwardly hands us another plate, compliments of the chef, whoever he might be. It as a few tender pieces of fish. We pick at it, aghast.

Surveying the damage

Then dessert, a bowl with a scoop of matcha ice cream, a tapioca pearl pudding, and azuki beans.

The bill comes. It is exorbitant, nearly three times our requested budget.

We are beat down by the tide from the kitchen. It’s been a long week, and all we can really do at this point is to laugh. So we do. And go for a walk, doggy bag in tow.

How could this have been avoided? The waitress could have turned us down politely, then firmly directed us towards a few recommendations. Or she could have at least immediately asked a manager to confirm her refusal. Either way, her tactic of dropping the table and adding an additional layer of confusion – and losing our budget in translation – was unacceptable.

Lessons for restaurants:
1) Know your product
2) If you can’t fulfill a customer’s demands, have a strategy for ushering them to an option you can do
3) If you attempt to fulfill an unusual request, communicate expectations
4) Do not use omakase as an excuse to write your own check

I eat sushi for breakfast and lunch the next day. After a quick run in the microwave, I admit that it tastes good. It tastes better, in fact, curled up on the couch, remote in hand. And there wasn’t a waitress in sight.

Masa’s in Porter Square Exchange Mall serves some really awful sushi

Lingbo Li — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:17:16 +0000

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

Lingbo Li — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:02:04 +0000

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

Lingbo Li — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:59:59 +0000

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

Lingbo Li — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:26:05 +0000

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.

Beautiful women, ramen, and roast pork buns at Ippudo, NYC

Lingbo Li — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:22:22 +0000

It’s funny how it happens: I met photographer Michael Donnelly at the end of a different friendship. I happened to be at the friend of that friend’s apartment, and when I learned that his father had photographed Ruth Reichl, culinary goddess and editor of Gourmet, I knew I had to meet him. He walked out of his room wrapped in a white bathrobe and spoke with a rarefied South African accent. We chatted about chefs, cooking, and Ruth, and the next day, I googled him and sent a thank you email.

We finally ended up meeting again recently at a Japanese ramen restaurant called Ippudo (65 4th Avenue, NYC) at his suggestion. (It was recently reviewed by Frank Bruni in the NY Times. Bruni, sadly, recently resigned as the Times restaurant critic.) Ippudo is the kind of restaurant that subscribes to the entire experience. I had to fight my way through a heavy red drape to make it to the bar, where he was waiting. A slender, long-necked Asian barmaid with ruler-straight bangs handed him his receipt. As we followed our hostess (a butterfly tattoo pinned down by a spaghetti strap across her left shoulder), two waiters cried welcomes in enthused Japanese.

“They have fantastic roast pork buns,” he told me as we sat down. We both got a bowl of ramen with berkshire pork. In the background, servers served up screams with their sake bombs.

I immediately photographed the roast pork buns (lip smackingly fatty and perfectly spicy). Throughout the meal, he proved to be one of the most photograph-supportive meal partners I’d ever had. Rather than being intimidating (after all, he’d shot for Vogue and Elle), he offered nothing but praise and support. He even failed to offer constructive criticism at my prompting, and just encouraged me to continue shooting.

Our ramen came, a sunburst of a halved hardboiled egg floating amidst the dramatic mottling of oil on its surface. I fished out the fatty bits of pork first for a taste. We talked a bit about my summer plans, then about racism in the modeling industry. He talked about the honor and intimacy in photography, about beauty (its power, personality, and transience), and also his experiences shooting Claudia Schiffer (a bombshell) and Brooke Shields (who looked pretty but not spectacular in person, but unexpectedly stunned on film). He loved Isabella Rosselini, who was “mousy” in person but fantastic in front of the camera.

“The best girls,” he said, “are a little off. They have to really try.”

I was glad I took a look at the dessert menu. It came as a tiny red book, smaller than my palm, with each dessert presented as a low-fi picture and facing title. I decided on the matcha brulee, which turned out to be a green tea creme brulee topped by a scoop of green tea ice cream and crown with a paper-thin slice of dessicated strawberry.

He told me about the incredible, short career of Alexa Singer, who shot ten covers of Vogue in one year.

The waitress came with mugs of tea.

He showed me mockups of the book he was working on, about how chefs communicate through cooking, and pointed out photos of Jean Georges, and Lydia Shire, and the beautiful image he’d taken of Ruth Reichl in a wide-brimmed black hat sitting in a room bathed in light.

“I think I’ll have her write the introduction,” he mused.

Joys of Japanese Food – Cream & Azuki Buns, Unagi Nigiri, Salmon Terayaki, Spicy Eel Roll

Lingbo Li — Thu, 21 May 2009 02:51:05 +0000

Porter Square Exchange Mall is a veritable heaven of cheap Japanese food, with everything from that strangely sweet, addictive Japanese curry, octopus dumplings (takoyaki), giant bowls of ramen, and of course, sushi. My friend David, a fan of Japanese food, had never been here, so I knew it was ripe time to introduce him to all that is delicious in Porter Square.

Spicy eel roll

Salmon teriyaki - the vegetables were pretty atrocious

He insisted on Blue Fin, the classiest establishment here. (I wrote an entry on my visit back in February.) He had salmon terayaki and unagi nigiri and I had spicy eel roll along with two of the nigiri (delicious). I had a bite of his salmon (excellent), although I found the spicy eel roll tasty but not too remarkable.

UNAAGIIII

The unagi was where it was at. As I wrote on 3 Buck Bites:

Glistening, wrapped in a belt of seaweed, lying seductively on a snowy white bed of sushi rice. Then pop one in your mouth and ahhhh, heaven! Cherubs! Harajuku girls! So reliable. Blue Fin’s unagi come generously portioned and warm, so make sure to eat them quickly for maximum pleasure. (Not like that’s a real challenge.)

Afterwards, I couldn’t resist the siren call of dessert: a cream and azuki stuffed bun.

Cream and azuki bun

action shot

David struggles with the awesome feat

I eat a hunk of wasabi at Blue Fin in Porter Square Exchange Mall

Lingbo Li — Sat, 16 May 2009 04:03:14 +0000

North End Scallops, Porter Sushi, Audio Slideshows: A busy weekend

Lingbo Li — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:57:25 +0000

FRIDAY

12:15pm: decide to drop Macroeconomics. Now I’m only taking four classes!

1:15pm: Run off with Crimson photographer to Second Time Around, Oona’s, and Great Eastern Trading Company to get audio and video for a slideshow. Photographer is unexpectedly hiliarious; storeowners are sometimes crazy/unstable.

4:30pm: Makeovers at the YWCA. Turns out the women are more impressed by my French manicure skillz than my artful eyeshadow application. I administer white tips on nails ragged, chapped, and worn down to their nubs. The women are very sweet. I am embarrassed by the state of my makeup collection, which is smeared in spilled bronze eyeshadow.

6:30pm: Stop at Kickass Cupcakes in Davis Square for some uh, kickass cupcakes as a birthday gift. I order four, with an extra for myself. I wolf down my mojito cupcake walking back to the T stop. The cream cheese frosting is cut the tang of lime and the center is soaked with rum – enough to warm my throat.

Kickass Cupcakes

10:30pm: Drop off birthday present. Present recipient is inebriated and proceeds to throw up twice, after which she feels better and munches on a corner of a Super Chocolate cupcake. The rest go in the fridge.

12:30pm: I am shooed off the table of of The Advocate by the DJ, who reminds me that it collapsed last time. Time for the Kong!

1am: Mmm, scallion pancakes and scorpion bowls. How much more classic can you get?

SATURDAY

2pm: Time to research in the North End for the Unofficial Guide. I have lunch at La Famiglia Giorgio, which is not really worth the shitty cellphone pictures I took of it. I nosh on lobster ravioli smothered in pink vodka cream sauce and scallop giorgio.

4:33pm: Woah, the Freedom Trail! Woah, tourists! Paul fucking Revere! This feels wrong, somehow. Kind of like touching John Harvard’s foot, you know?

Japanese love their tentacles

8pm: Valentine’s dinner, spontaneously found in Porter Square Exchange Mall at Blue Fin. Stop at Kotobukiya, a Japanese grocery, first.

Kotobukiya

Monkfish liver, duhhh (Does cooking use only mean that it can't be an organ transplant?)

Then, the actual meal, which was expansive, adventurous, and lovely.

Sashimi on a bed of natto (fermented soybean with a bizarrely sticky nature - picking it up results in cobweb-like strings trailing from bowl to plate)

Unagi, my favorite!

Valentine's day sushi platter... the rose stem to the left of the image was secured in a base of wasabi.

Donburi bowl, the roe is fun to eat.

SUNDAY

10am: Work out at the gym, which I’ve failed to do for longer than I’d have liked.

Noon: Do some hair and makeup for the Identities fashion show photoshoot. The nice thing about doing makeup, I’ve realized, is far from making you see all the flaws you should cover up, it makes you see all the little things that make someone beautiful.

Near the end, I hold down the fort while the models are off doing their hip hop shoot. I take photos of myself with my hairspray-assisted hairstyle.

Photobooth: sometimes better for boredom than Facebook.

2:30pm: Off to the Garment District and The Closet for more audio and photos for the audio slideshow with another photographer. This takes way too long.

Me standing in front of the Garment District's shocking pink storefront.

7pm: Crimson exec dinner. People give silly gifts, I watch passively, feel lonely, go back to Crimson and finish editing slideshow. It’s BALLER. Me and the editor do the crossfade. We add background noise. I do voiceovers. He records me screaming “fuck a duck!” incessantly. We laugh. We cry. We mock the interview subjects.

12:45am: Exit the Crimson. Finally.

Here is the fruit of my labor (plus 3 other dedicated people).

This took, uh, 10 solid hours of my life.