Sushi Kikuzawa After being inspired by Camemberu, DT and I was looking forward to gorging ourselves at this tiny sushi bar in International Building which offers ala-carte sushi buffet. Asked the rest of the ASSes but they chickened out. So in the end only the both of us plus WWh made it there for dinner.

The place was really tiny with only 12(?) counter seats (a hallmark of authenticity) though the staff there seems to be from the motherland. Hmmm...

Anyway we got ourselves seated and never looked back. First came some edamame, some stewed oden/chicken and a small bowl of delicious stewed pork.

Sashimi was next, with this being the only dish where you only get 1 shot at. The fish was reasonably fresh, though as expected the tuna wasn't anything to shout about. It's damn hard to get proper tuna in this part of the world. The white fish sashimi is interestingly called leather jacket...

Before we could finish polishing off the sashimi, the sushi started coming fast and furiously. The way they serve is more like omakase where the chef will just continuously serve you the freshest produce of the day (though in this case it could be the cheapest produce out of their selection :P). Oh yeah forgot to add that o-toro sushi is not part of the sushi buffet and if ordered separately costs $20 for two pieces. And before we got onto the sushi, the only other customers in the shop left, leaving the 3 musketeers (or stooges) to enjoy the sole attention of the chef.

The sushi itself was really good for this price level. What impressed me more was that they have aburi style sushi here, i.e. using a blowtorch or a light-sabre, whichever is more convenient, to sear the fish. The aburi shake is the 3rd sushi from the left pictured above. My first experience with this style was at a sushi bar at Tsukiji. An old lady there politely requested for aburi toro and the chef's eyes lighted up. He then proceeded to take out his blowtorch (no, not THAT blowtorch) and prepared the semi-cooked sushi for her. From then on, I know how to impress a sushi master with my vocab. :P Aburi!

Chawanmushi came not long after. I suspect that they steamed it upon ordering as it took a while to arrive after we ordered it.

A shot of the chef torching a squid sushi.

Hedgehog sushi. Tasted pretty interesting.

All in all we had at least 15 sushi each (out of 35 possible choices) plus a negitoro handroll. There were many other choices in the menu which we could order such as donburi, ochazuke, cold tofu, salad, etc. but we didn't. I must say though that the aburi shake tasted really good and would come back again just for this. To round up our meal we had fruit pudding, which was more like jelly. It was really wobbly and was a good end to the meal. Total damage inflicted on us was $46 per person incld taxes.

Labels: food

  F-ed by me at 8:17 PM

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