Here in Westchester I’m lucky enough to live close to a terrific local sushi restaurant called Hajime. The owner/head chef is a guy named Sam who prepares terrific meals for me every time I go there (at least once a week). The Japanese term for “chef’s choice” dining (basically a tasting menu) is omakase. At $50 per person, Sam’s omakase is a steal. Really inventive dishes with high quality fish, and it’s enough food to get me full (which is really saying something; my name is on the wall of fame at the Acme Oyster House in New Orleans 🙂 ). Sam’s restaurant is also the only one in Westchester that gets toro on par with what you’ll find at top Manhattan restaurants (i.e. the fish purveyor that deals this stuff doesn’t have any other accounts in Westchester; and this is the distributor that provides toro to Nobu and Yasuda). Sam is a friendly likeable guy, but he understandably prefers to cater to clientele who are a little more knowledgeable about sushi. For example, he has no problems turning away customers that request things like spicy tuna rolls with extra sauce on the side. As Sam likes to put it, those people don’t like sushi, they like sauce!

Recently Sam mentioned to me that he had heard of a place in White Plains that was also offering omakase and he said I should check it out. While it might sound strange for a sushi restaurant owner to be telling a customer of a competitor, Sam has become like a friend to me and he knew I’d be interested in that sort of thing, plus he’s confident enough in what he offers that somehow he knew this other restaurant would not be a real threat. He was certainly right. I checked the place out the other night. It’s called Sushi Nanase and it’s a tiny little shop next to the Nippon Daido Japanese market. Nanase’s omakase costs $85. I certainly don’t mind paying that much for a meal, but once you go over $65, my expectations shoot way up. And in this case, Nanase was a real disappointment. It was five courses, one a grilled item, and in the end, it was just lacking. If the quality were better, I could have overlooked the lack of quantity and vice versa. But I left there very hungry and not terribly impressed with the things I did have. Naturally the toro was not as rich as I’m used to, but that was to be expected. The pieces of sushi were also tiny. The fish was certainly not bad by any means, but just not exceptional, and certainly not substantial. There were however two items that were excellent- a high quality monkfish liver appetizer, and a giant prawn sashimi. Beyond that, everything else was good but never remarkable. The chef was also quite fussy. He liked to use a blowtorch on his eel which isn’t too bad, but then he also mucked about with a series of six little lip-balm sized containers of various salts and powders which he liked to sprinkle atop each piece of sushi. Very fussy, considering that he’d have to unscrew each one to get at the powder and then screw back when he was done. Much of these things didn’t taste of anything, and in cases where they did, they didn’t seem appropriate. Why would you want to sprinkle green tea powder on your sushi? Oh well. It also occurred to me that for only $10 more I could have had the tasting menu at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. When you look at it that way, it’s even more depressing!