I usually avoid Hajime on Fri/Sat nites because it is too busy for Sam to concentrate on preparing an omakase dinner for me. He’s never refused me, but I just feel bad for him trying to serve everyone in a packed restaurant while having to think through and prepare the more time consuming dishes involved in his omakase. So last Friday night I decided I just wanted to get some takeout, but I kind of felt like having Japanese. After a Google search, I came upon a new restaurant called Toyo Sushi just a few blocks away from me. Pictures showed an elegant dining room and two sushi chefs who supposedly brought a combined 25+ years in sushi experience with them from Tokyo. Ok, I was intrigued. So I head over there and peer in thru the window. Good sign- the restaurant was packed. Bad sign- there were no Asian customers anywhere in sight. No matter, I figured I would give it a try since I was there anyway. I walk in and ask for a seat at the sushi bar. The hostess says “Sure, this way please” and then turns to a waiter and barks a command in…fugg me… Mandarin!!!??? Yes, this is a growing trend everwhere, even Westchester- Japanese restaurants owned and run by Chinese people. To you non-Asians this may seem like no big deal. If you are Asian, and especially if you are really into food, you know this is a problem. But I am open minded so I sat down and prepared to suspend my judgement until I had given them a fair shot. Strikes two and three came immediately upon being seated. I look up at the two “sushi chefs” before me. Neither one looked a day over 25. Neither one of them was Japanese either. I don’t know where the two Japanese chefs from the picture on the website were, but wouldn’t you expect them to be working the sushi bar on a Friday night with a full house?? Of course you would expect that, but if you knew that they were all Chinese people who owned and ran the place, then you’d just as likely expect that the supposedly Japanese sushi chefs would probably not even be on the payroll any longer. Do I seem like I’m giving my fellow Chinese an unfair shake? Well where it comes to opening Japanese or Japanese/Korean hybrid restaurants, I assure you I am not. It is far more the rule rather than the exception that when this happens, they are merely trying to run it as a successful business first and foremost, and the quality of the food comes as an afterthought. Bear in mind that this would not be the case if a Chinese person opened say, a French restaurant. No, what I’m talking about here is the conscious decision to open a Japanese or Korean restaurant because a. you look Asian and you figure the American dining public won’t know the difference between a chink and a Jap, b. Japanese and Korean menus command a higher price than typical Chinese food c. non-typical gourmet Chinese food is not an easy thing to do well and especially hard to make profitable. None of that sets up for a good restaurant. And let me tell you, sitting in a Japanese restaurant listening to the staff shout in Mandarin at each other is pretty damn annoying. Anyway, enough ranting about generalities, on to the food…

I ordered a soft shell crab appetizer, a sashimi deluxe, and a nabaeyaki udon. A bit more food than a normal person would eat in one sitting but as you know, that’s how I roll. The soft shell crab was actually good, so I started thinking that maybe they do cooked food well, but I still didn’t have high hopes for the sashimi. I was justified in my thinking. First of all, since I was seated at the sushi bar, I could see their entire inventory and they had no toro and no uni. That’s a good indication that this is not a quality sushi restaurant. I then tasted the sashimi that was served to me. The mackerel was fresh but lacked flavor. The striped bass was fine, but believe it or not, the pieces were not sliced all the way through, so when I went to pick up one slice, a second one dangled below it. That’s pretty shameful. The maguro was a bit soft so it probably wasn’t at its freshest. The yellowtail was not as rich as yellowtail should be, but it wasn’t bad. And then the worst of the plate was the salmon. First, the taste was bland, which is rather unusual for salmon since it is so fatty. But the main problem was much more serious than that. You could tell just by looking at it that it had not been properly treated before slicing. Salmon being a freshwater fish is prone to carrying parasites. Properly trained sushi chefs know that they should marinate and freeze salmon overnight in a brine or other liquid that parasites can’t survive. I ate plenty of wasabi to chase it down just to be safe, and besides, it needed the extra flavor anyway. And if that didn’t kill anything nasty in my dinner, the sake I chased it with certainly would have.

I then finished my meal with the nabaeyaki udon. The fried shrimp was decent albeit slightly greasier than it should have been. The rest was mostly passable, although they used fresh shitake mushrooms instead of the dried kind which has more flavor and the pieces of bok choy floating in the soup tasted a little sour so they might have been well past their prime. All in all it was a below-average meal but at least the soft shelled crab was enjoyable. I will not be returning unless it’s to just get soft shelled crab…to go (so I don’t have to listen to the chinks).