Shabu Shabu 70

A friend of mine has been itching to try shabu shabu ever since she saw it in the film Lost in Translation. I’ve had it several times in my life, including twice in Japan. While I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it, shabu shabu is always fun. There are only a handful of shabu shabu restaurants in New York, and as my friend lives on the Upper East Side, I decided to give Shabu Shabu 70 a try.

In case you’re not familiar with it, shabu shabu (Japanese for “swish swish”) is food that you cook yourself at the table in lightly spiced boiling water. Some restaurants offer a variety of meat, seafood, and vegetable platters, but Shabu Shabu 70 offers just beef or chicken ($20.50 pp, minimum of two); we chose the beef. You start with a platter of very thinly-sliced beef and another of vegetables (noodles, onions, carrots, mushrooms, greens, and tofu). The meat is so thin that each slice cooks in a matter of 15 to 20 seconds. The vegetables take a little longer.

When you decide that a piece is done, you fish it out of the boiling water with your chopsticks, dip it in one of the two sauces provided, and slurp it into your mouth (it tends to get a little messy). I don’t usually like to work for food I’m paying someone else to prepare, but I make an exception for shabu shabu, which never fails as a social activity, and is also quite tasty. As my friend pointed out, the ingredients are all very lean, so it’s a healthy meal too. By the time you’re done, the water takes on the taste of all the food, so the grand finale is to drink it as a soup.

In Japan, I’ve been to restaurants that do only shabu shabu, where the cooking apparatus is built right into the table. At Shabu Shabu 70, despite the name, they serve a wide variety of Japanese food, so the cooking apparatus is carried over to your table. We started with a couple of excellent sushi rolls ($4.50–7.50).

Service was friendly and helpful. The server could tell that we don’t do this every day, and came over several times to check up on us. I was also pleased that my bar tab was transferred over to the table, something far too many restaurants refused to do.

The décor is fairly plain, but for $20.50 apiece we got an enormous amount of food. Indeed, one reviewer suggested that four people could share a portion for two. With appetizers and dessert, that just might be the case. The lack of a seafood shabu shabu option was a bit perplexing, but the one option offered was plenty enjoyable.

Shabu Shabu 70 (314 E. 70th St. between First & Second Avenues, Upper East Side)

Food: *
Service: *½
Ambiance: okay, but undistinguished
Overall: *

Benihana

A friend of mine gets a peculiar Benihana craving about once a year or so — “peculiar,”  because she can’t stand the “Benihana smell,” which so thoroughly impregnates her clothes that even laundering doesn’t entirely remove it. But she enjoys the theater of hibachi cooks preparing dinner before your eyes, even though the act is entirely predictable.

So at her suggestion we visited Benihana earlier this week. To an extent, the theatricality of it is still fun, even though we all know what’s coming. Our chef did all of the usual tricks, like making a volcano out of a sliced onion, performing acrobatic catches with shrimp tails hurled in the air, and spinning his knives as if he were a samauri.

The food wasn’t particularly impressive. Perhaps the best item was fried rice prepared tableside. Grilled shrimp were also enjoyable, but steak was rather dry and flavorless. A salad tasted like it was mass-produced, and left sitting in the fridge for a while. A frazzled server took a while to deliver our drink orders, and throughout the meal we had the slight sensation of being rushed. At Benihana, all parties are seated at tables of eight. If a couple of people are left lingering, the whole table is unavailable, so they want you out of there on a pre-programmed schedule. It was not particularly busy on a Monday night, but the requirement of seating people in batches of eight must be a constant constraint for them.

For the amount of food, prices are reasonable, with most entrées in the $20–30 range, which includes soup, salad and dessert. A gin and tonic, which came with a liberal amount of gin, was only $5.50. As my friend noted, Benihana is surely the place to come and get plastered, as most Manhattan restaurants nowadays charge over $10 for a mixed drink (and $15 is certainly not unheard of). If you double-up on the G&T’s, perhaps you’ll overlook the fact that the food is just mediocre. The faux-Japanese décor gets you in the mood. While you’re waiting to be seated, see how many celebrities you can identify in the photos posted in the vestibule.

Benihana (47 W 56th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, West Midtown)

Food: Comme-ci, comme-ça
Service: Ah, so-so
Ambiance: Almost like Japan
Overall: Okay

Nobu

I had lunch at Nobu on Wednesday, probably my 4th or 5th time at the restaurant, always for lunch. (Accounts of two past visits can be found here and here.)

As I have noted before, if you show up without a reservation at 11:45 or noon, you will invariably be seated. In the past, we’ve always been told that we’d have to be finished by 1:30, or so. No such guidance this week; even when we left, at 2pm, the restaurant was not full.

I started with a salmon skin roll, which was very good, if not quite offering the taste explosion of the best sushi restaurants. My colleague and I shared four of the signature dishes: yellowtail tartar with caviar and wasabe sauce; spicy rock shrimp tempura; squid “pasta”, and miso black cod. I think the squid pasta has lost a bit of its lustre; when you get over the novelty, it is really nothing special. But the others are all top-notch, and it is no surprise that they bring the miso black cod last. Although imitated a hundred times over, there is still no miso black cod like Nobu’s.

I finished with an apple crisp with cinnamon ice cream, and while you don’t think of Nobu for its desserts, this was beautifully prepared and a sensory pleasure.

Service was excellent.

As an unrelated aside, did you ever wonder why you can’t get through to Nobu on the reservation line? At lunch time, there are five phone operators sitting at a booth near the front door. They are the reservations department. While waiting for my coat, I overheard one of them telling the others about a recent social event she’d attended. The phone rang: “Nobu, can you hold, please?” After putting the caller on hold, she finished her story about the social event.

Nobu (105 Hudson Street at Franklin Street, TriBeCa)

Food: ***

Service: ***

Ambiance: **

Overall: ***

Gari (West Side)

In late October, a friend and I had dinner at Gari. The place doesn’t seem to be as crowded as reports after the restaurant first opened, so perhaps the buzz has died down. From the time we arrived (6:00) to the time we left (7:15), it wasn’t full. I do realize that those are early hours for a Saturday night dinner in New York, but we had an opera to catch. If you’re looking for another pre-Lincoln Center option, Gari should be on your list.

We also saw no evidence of the service issues mentioned in some early reports. The staff was helpful, attentive, and efficient. We were also pleased to find that Gari is a rarity among Manhattan’s newer restaurants: a place where you can actually hear yourself talk, without having to shout.

It’s rare that Frank Bruni covers a restaurant so well that there’s really nothing much for me to add, but his two-star review on March 2, 2005, sounded all the right notes. I agree with the two-star rating. We weren’t able to try as much of the menu as Bruni did, but we were most pleased with what we had.

We had the sushi omakase. As Bruni mentioned, the restaurant actively discourages the use of soy sauce, and indeed there is none on the table. Our server made a point of mentioning that none was needed. I’m no expert, but this was some of the best sushi I’d ever tasted. Every piece was unique, and already perfectly seasoned. To dip in soy sauce would have been a crime, and we remained honest citizens.

As others have mentioned, including Bruni, you aren’t going to get out of Gari cheaply. The recommended omakase came with ten pieces each, which wasn’t enough to sate us, so we had three more. None of the sake options was inexpensive, but we settled on a $47 bottle that we nursed through the meal. With edamame and dessert (a fig tart with green tea ice cream), the final bill for two including tax came to over $200 before the tip.

This is sushi on another level of skill and creativity than one finds at most Japanese restaurants. I can’t recommend Gari to people on a tight budget, but if you can afford the prices it’s well worth it.

Gari (370 Columbus Avenue at 78th Street, Upper West Side)

Food: **
Service: **½
Ambiance: *½
Overall: **

Matsuri

Note: Matsuri closed in March 2012. A branch of the club/restaurant Tao will replace it.

*

I dined with a couple of colleagues at Matsuri in early December. While William Grimes was convinced that the sushi was in the upper third, we considered it merely mid-range — which is to say, neither bad nor particularly distinguished.

We ordered a sushi/sashimi platter that was described as a selection for five people, although the three of us went ahead and ordered a bit more after consuming all of that. A shrimp tempura roll seemed the best item on the platter, with honorable mention to some extremely tender tuna belly.

The Times review described the restaurant’s location as Chelsea. Nowadays, one would describe it as “Meatpacking-adjacent,” with the main drag of that clubby neighborhood within spitting distance of Matsuri’s door. The restaurant is lovely inside, and we had a perfectly happy time, topping off the evening with Macallan 18’s (and one of our party with an excellent creme brulee dessert).

But we won’t rush back.

Matsuri (369 W. 16th Street at Ninth Avenue in the Maritime Hotel, Chelsea)

Food: *
Service: *
Ambiance: **
Overall: *

EN Japanese Brasserie

Two friends and I had dinner at EN Japanese Brasserie on Wednesday evening. EN is part of the city’s new hip trend for big-box Japanese restaurants with Nobu-inspired menus. It is one of the pleasanter destinations in that genre. Our reservation was at 6:30, a time when the restaurant is still comparatively empty. However, we were impressed with the high ceilings and the wide spacing of the tables. Even at peak time, I suspect my companions and I wouldn’t have had to shout (as we did at the comparatively claustrophobic BLT Prime).

Service was about as efficient as one could hope for. Obviously it helped that the place was nearly empty at that hour, but a sparsely-populated dining room is never any guarantee of the server’s undivided attention.

As at other restaurants in the genre, you’re encouraged to order a variety of small plates, and share. One is never sure precisely how many of these plates are enough to make a meal. Our waiter naturally advised us to err on the high-side; his upselling wasn’t unctuous, but certainly we were aware of it. Anyhow, we chose four items, and once those were finished, ordered a fifth.

We had two types of sushi rolls with different tangy dipping sauces, shrimp fritters, a tempura sampler, and the obligatory miso black cod. The latter didn’t erase memories of the signature dish at Nobu, but all were wonderfully prepared. The tempura batter was crispy and light; the sushi rolls crisp and flavorful. This is definitely the way to order at EN, as I don’t think any of these dishes would have been nearly as successful as one’s only entrée.

If we had any complaint, it was the speed at which the dishes arrived. The trend at these “small plate” restaurants is to deliver the food at the chef’s convenience, instead of the customer’s. After we ordered, it seemed we barely had time to blink before the food came trooping gaily out of the kitchen. It’s not that they needed our table; I just think it’s the way the restaurant is put together.

EN has one of the most ridiculously over-engineered, yet simultaneously unhelpful, websites . The menu shown there is far from complete. Frank Bruni complained of “an extremely long, confusing menu” in his one-star review. It appears there has been some simplification since then. The menu is now a single page, which makes it shorter than the Nobu menu.

As at any Japanese restaurant, it’s easy to spend a ton of money in a hurry. But our experience at EN showed that it is by no means necessary. We were out of there for $35 a head, including tax and tip, but without any alcohol.

EN Japanese Brasserie (435 Hudson Street at Leroy Street, Hudson Square)

Food: **
Service: *½
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

Swish: Shabu Shabu in the Village

There are plenty of Japanese restaurants in New York, but not many that specialize in shabu shabu. Swish takes its name from this less familiar branch of Japanese cuisine. As the restaurant’s website puts it:

Shabu shabu is the Japanese phrase for swish swish. This form of cooking received its name from the sound of food being skimmed through boiling broth. It is an Asian tradition of food preparation that has been around for thousands of years. Typical of long-established Asian dishes, shabu shabu is simple, healthy, low in carbs, and incredibly delicious.

The process is simply to place your food into the boiling broth, allowing different foods to cook for different lengths of time. You control the amount of cooking time. If you prefer crisper spinach, a brief swish will do it. If you like your mushrooms to melt in your mouth, allow them to swim in the broth for a few minutes.

Once you remove your food from the broth, it has a delicate flavor from the absorbed broth, and can be eaten as such to enjoy the food’s full flavors. It is also traditional to use special dipping sauces. Swish offers a variety of sauces to excite your taste buds.

Swish is in the middle of NYU territory, and its menu is priced attractively for students. You can order a personal size shabu shabu priced from $12.95-$16.95. If you’re more adventurous, you can choose your own broth (five offered, $3) and select the ingredients à la carte — anything from vegetables ($2 apiece) to Prime Rib eye ($8). There are seven available dipping sauces ($0.50 each). It’s like Craft on a budget.

There are also composed shabu shabu platters for two, and last night my friend and I ordered from the top of the menu: the Swish Special Combo (beef, seafood and vegetables) for $38, which came with the house broth and all seven sauces. Shabu shabu is a do-it-yourself eating experience, a Japanese fondue. The restaurant kindly provides a laminated card instructing you how long each item should be cooked. It can be anywhere from 10 minutes (potatoes) to 30 seconds (beef, which comes sliced paper-thin).

The broth comes in a crock pot and is placed on a burner with a blue flame. It soon comes to a near-boil. As it evaporates, your server will come around and add more. Some items just go into the pot, and you retrieve them later. Others you hold in place with a fish-net ladle. For the items that cook quickly, especially the beef, you can just swish them around while holding them with your chopsticks. Over time, the broth takes on the flavors of everything you’ve cooked. You spoon it into the bowls provided, and it becomes the soup course that ends your meal. The restaurant touts its cuisine as low-carb, but offsetting that is a high salt content. Drink plenty of liquids.

I’ve been to some shabu shabu places where the broth bowl is suspended below the table surface. Swish is able to do that for the personal-size servings, but when the order is for two, they serve it on a burner that sits on the table itself. This is a bit less convenient, as you have to reach up to cook the food.

Eating Swish’s special combo is like a decathalon of chopstick skills. Some items are easy, such as the beef, shrimp, mushrooms and scallops. But others are cumbersome for the chopstick-challenged, either because they’re unwieldy (cabbage, noodles), or because they tend to fall apart after cooking (crabmeat, whitefish, tofu). However, it all tastes delicious, and besides that it’s just plain fun.

Shabu shabu strikes me as a perfect adventure for groups — Swish’s tables seat up to four. With all of that self-help cooking going on, there’s plenty to talk and laugh about. The boiling broth creates plenty of steam, which will be especially welcome on cold winter nights. The restaurant’s literature also touts it as a good first-date place, but I would not recommend that. There’s too much opportunity for accidental slapstick humor as you fumble around with your chopsticks.

I don’t know why you’d go if you’re not interested in shabu shabu, but Swish does have other things to offer. There’s a small selection of curries and rice dishes. There are lunch specials as low as $6.95. We began our meal with an order of vegetable dumplings. These were wonderful, and I had to pinch myself to believe that we paid just $3.95 for six of them. The drinks menu offers a variety of teas and smoothies ($2.50 or $3.00 each). For sake, the only options were “hot” or “cold,” but $4.50 for a small bottle was a very fair price.

Swish gave me my first chance to try table1.com, the newest of the online reservation services. Every table1 reservation comes with a discount, but you pay $1.50 per person. For a smaller restaurant, table1 is clearly a good deal, because they don’t have to install proprietary software or hardware, as opentable requires. Anyhow, I paid $3 to reserve on table1, and got a $10.42 discount off of our $52.10 bill.

Swish’s spare décor of blond wood and bamboo mats is just about perfect, creating a sense of escape and discovery. We wished the background music were more suited to this serene environment. It was not at all loud, but it was a generic jazz/new age soundtrack that one could have heard anywhere. Our server was friendly, helpful, and extremely attentive, but dressed as if she were on her way to the gym.

Swish is owned by a couple of young NYU grads. It has been open just three months. With just nine tables, I suspect it will get busy once the students return to town and discover this little gem.

Swish (88 W. 3rd St, between Thompson & Sullivan Streets, Greenwich Village)

Food: *
Service: *½
Ambiance: *½
Overall: *

Sushi Lunch at Nobu

Note: Click here for a more recent visit to Nobu.

A vendor took me to lunch at Nobu yesterday. Just like the last time, we appeared promptly at the opening time 11:45am and were seated immediately, promising to vacate our table before 1:30pm.

Nobu offers several sushi and sashimi assortments for lunch, priced between $22.50 and $26.00. Any one of them is a steal, in my opinion. I ordered the “Special Sushi” at $26.00, which came with somewhere between 12-15 pieces, plus Miso Soup. The ingredients were first-class, as one would expect at this temple of Japanese cuisine. This must be one of the best upscale sushi bargains in town.

One of my dining companions offered me a piece of his softshell crab sushi, an astonishing composition. Another of the composed lunch plates offers Sashimi with Soft Shell Crab Roll at $23.50. I shall have to try that next time.

Nobu (105 Hudson Street at Franklin Street, TriBeCa)

Bond Street

A few years ago, Bond Street was the Japanese restaurant of the rich and famous. Every review mentioned the celebrities and fashion models one encountered there. It is still doing a healthy business, but you can land a reservation easily on OpenTable, and you score a 1,000-point bonus for requesting an off-peak time, which we did.

BondSt has a suave décor of cool earthtones. My brother said it’s the kind of restaurant that the chicks on Sex and the City frequent, but which he always assumed didn’t really exist. From the unassuming frontage of a townhouse on the eponymous street in NoHo, you don’t imagine that such an oasis lies waiting for you inside. An elevator took us to our table on the second floor, emphasizing the feeling of being transported to another world.

I ordered the $60 tasting menu for me and my two guests. (Tasting menus are also available at $40, $80, and $100.) We were served eight courses, as follows:

1. Steamed, salted edamame.

2. Vegetable tower in a preparation so fancy it seemed a crime to bite into it.

3. Small squares of tuna tartare, with a respberry sauce and szechuan peppercorns.

4. BBQ quail wings with a beehive of fried soba noodles. The crispy quail wings were a highlight, although gone all too quickly, but the soba noodles were ruined by an overly salty soy sauce.

5. Scallop and shrimp over a sweet potato puree. This was the hit of the evening.

6. A sushi plate, six or seven pieces, with a mixture of salmon, whitefish, yellowtail, tuna roll, and others.

7. Noodle soup with seafood tempura.

8. Dessert – each of us received something different, which we shared, and all of which were wonderful. One was a bento box of mixed sorbets and ices; another was a heavenly preparation resembling strawberry shortcake with heavy cream, served in a sundae bowl; and third, a vanilla custard.

We ordered from the lower end of the sake menu, a $45 bottle that was smooth and fruity to the taste – one of the best sakes I’ve experienced, which may just tell you that I am not a true connoisseur. Service was friendly, attentive, and unpretentious. I can’t say that Bond Street equaled the amazing lunch I had at Nobu a few weeks ago, but it was a great meal nevertheless, which I’d be happy to recommend to anybody.

Bond Street (6 Bond Street between Broadway and Lafayette Street, NoHo)

Food: **
Service: **
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

Nobu

Note: Click here for a more recent review of Nobu.

A vendor invited me out to lunch at Nobu on Friday. That meant he was paying. We had no reservation, but we were waiting by the door when they opened at 11:45am, and we were seated immediately. My host had done this before, so apparently it’s a dependable way to get into Nobu without a rez. We only had to promise that we’d vacate our table by 1:30pm. It was my first visit.

For lunch, Nobo offers a wide variety of sushi and sashimi plates, soups and side dishes, several sushi/sashimi assortments in the $23-$28 range, a prix fixe package at $20.04, and the chef’s omakase at “$55 to $65 and up.” There’s also a two-column list running to a closely-spaced half-page, which the waiter called “Chef Nobu’s signature dishes.” The menu had another name for them, but the waiter’s term sticks in my memory.

The waiter advised us to skip the sushi, and to order 4 or 5 of the signature dishes, which he told us are served “Tapas style.” That means they come one at a time, to be shared by the table. We chose 5 of the signature dishes – basically the ones the waiter recommended – as well as the Spicy Seafood Soup, which my host had enjoyed on his previous visit. The waiter’s descriptions went by at blazing speed, and frankly I wasn’t entirely sure what we’d chosen. He told us about a few special dishes not on the menu, and we chose one of these, but I always wonder why a restaurant can’t be bothered to put the daily specials on a piece of paper. I think Nobu could manage it. At any rate, it all sounded good.

The Spicy Seafood Soup came first, and it reminded me of that old commercial about the soup so chunky you want to eat it with a fork. There was just an amazing amount of seafood packed into the soup bowl. Then came yellowtail with cilantro and jalapeno peppers; I thought the last two ingredients slightly overwhelmed the first. It was the only dish about which I had even the slightest reservations. Our second signature dish was kobe beef, thinly sliced, and prepared with two kinds of spices. A tuna sashimi salad was sheer perfection, with several large slices of rare tuna. Then came squid pasta (hard to explain), and finally a black sea bass so rich and flavorful that I can still taste it.

I can see why the waiter steered us away from sushi. My host, who had ordered sushi the last time he visited, confirmed this. The so-called signature dishes are extraordinary and without parallel. The sushi, he said, is of course among the best that can be had, but doesn’t stand out from what’s available elsewhere quite so conspicuously.

With five dishes shared among two of us, plus soup, I left Nobu quite full, and yet sorry that the meal was over. Every dish was creative, full of flavor, perfectly seasoned, and prepared with an obvious attention to every detail. While enjoying our own meal, my host and I watched the parade of plates arriving at adjoining tables. No matter what you order, every dish entertains the eye as much as the taste buds. They are all works of sculpture – “Art in Food,” as my host observed. He promised to invite me back again, this time for dinner, in a couple of months or so. I can hardly wait.

Nobu (105 Hudson Street at Franklin Street, TriBeCa)