Restaurants

Sushi Safari

After years of denial, our critic learns the truth: She has to eat it raw

By Joanne Harrison 

A confession: Over the last decade, while people nationwide were learning about sushi, going gaga over urchin roe and ebi and maguro and awabi, I was lagging behind, wondering how anyone could even consider putting raw fish between their lips. Perhaps it was my dual Boston/Houston background, but it seemed wrong, wrong, wrong to eat seafood that wasn't broiled, baked or fried. Discussions of the sinus-clearing properties of wasabi, the Japanese horseradish that sat like a green lump on the plate to be mixed with the soy sauce into which the sushi was dipped, were meaningless to me. Arguments over whether green tea or Kirin beer was the proper drink to wash down a tekka-maki passed over my head or, rather, outside my interest. When I entered a Japanese restaurant, I turned my attention to the tempura listings. Other people could wrestle with whether they wanted to risk their lives by going for the ultimate sushi, the potentially poisonous blowfish. I'd take the chicken teriyaki, thank you very much.

That stance served me well until recently, when it seemed that every street I drove down was sprouting a new sushi restaurant. It may have been that I simply started noticing what was there, or it may have been a reaction to a real spurt of sushi (so to speak). Friends who pay closer attention to the raw fish market than I do indicated that the latter was the case. After years in which a handful of dependable sushi joints had ruled, a number of newcomers, and expansions of old favorites, had joined in the battle for the sushi consumer. They were happy about this. The more, they felt, the merrier.

As for me, the expansion meant I could stay ignorant no longer. I figured it was time to overcome provincialism. So I set out to see what I had missed. With friends in tow, I hit a quintet of Houston sushi emporiums. And what did I find? Not just that my longtime concerns had been exaggerated, but that in many cases Americanization had all but eliminated the exotic quality that first attracted people to the food (even as it drove me away). Actually, crossing the sushi line was so easy that I was almost disappointed -- almost.

One of the first places I ventured into was Back Door Sushi, a new Japanese-cuisine addition to Hunan River, a long-established Chinese eatery in the River Oaks Shopping Center. Located literally at the restaurant's back door, the annex is a tiny space that reflects sushi's origins in space-starved Japan. At Back Door there are only four small tables, and the service can be truly amnesiac. Knowledgeable guests prefer places at the brightly lighted bar, which showcases the seafood ingredients and is presided over by three smiling, knife-wielding sushi chefs, none of whom, on one recent visit, seemed familiar enough with English to explain to a neophyte which cuts of fish were which. Fortunately, on a small table to the right of the entrance there was a full-color takeout menu the size of a small poster that featured photos of many of the offerings, listing major ingredients along with prices, which range from $2 for six poker-chip-size slices of kappa-maki (cucumber roll) to $8.95 for a combination of five traditional sushi pieces and six quarter-size slabs of California roll (cucumber, avocado, crab).

For me, the kappa-maki and California roll were a way to ease into more serious sushi. I was amazed to find out that though made of seaweed, the nori (the black-green paper-like sushi wrap) tasted not at all fishy. In Back Door's California rolls it had a pleasantly crisp texture that complemented the crunchy-fresh threads of vegetables, the delicate taste of the crab and the tasty short-grain rice known as shari that, prepared with rice vinegar, sugar and salt, then quickly cooled to create a chewiness and glossy sheen, acts as the foundation on which sushi is built.

Though connoisseurs might find it too Americanized, I was also taken by the sushi at Cafe Japon's new branch on Westheimer. The menu deliberately sets out to make sushi more American palate-friendly. To this end, Cafe Japon offers a number of house-special rolls ($5.25 to $6.50/$1.25 at happy hour) made either with vegetables such as cold baby asparagus spears or with cooked seafood such as shrimp or crab. The restaurant also features Texas-style versions of maki, a.k.a. sushi rolls, such as the ceviche and Cajun hand rolls ($2.50 each). For the latter, the shari rice hid crispy, tempura-battered fried oysters, crunchy shoestrings of cucumber and smooth narrow slices of avocado. And, as a lagniappe, the contents were topped off with a spiky splash of peppery Louisiana-style sauce. No doubt this concoction wouldn't pass muster in Tokyo, but it tasted pretty good to me. So did the ceviche hand roll, with its marinated whitefish and the homey, familiar flavors of ripe tomato and fresh cilantro.

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