Despite living a polished stone's throw from Kaze for the more than a year it's been open, I had never been there. Reports in this thread and others about its brand of gussied-up sushi had put me off, so had the fact that it figured so prominently in all that trendy fusion
"Sushi places people are talking about!" hype, and-- well, it never exactly needed my business, by the look of it. My idea of sushi and sashimi is minimal-purist, about as elaborate as it gets is Bob-San's slices of
tuna in soy sauce and jalapeno, where I don't even eat the jalapeno but taste its recent presence on the pristinely simple fish.
But it was inevitable that I try it some time, and so I did. Kaze is not strictly a sushi place, in fact it has quite a lot of cooked food, but I decided to put it to the test on the raw stuff, saying that I wanted to try a lot of things, that I didn't want no stinkin' rolls, and that I didn't need to be coddled with the comfy choices like tuna and salmon. Somehow that resulted in me getting a double portion of tuna, starting with this tartare:
Ubiquitous and novel in the 90s, tuna tartare is practically a nostalgia dish by this point, the new California cuisine's equivalent to Shrimp deJonghe. Here it was atop a bunch of matchstick-sized apple, with soy sauce and a little red pepper-- which rendered the apple purely a textural element. Basically this was a nice start to the kind of fusiony-trendy meal I had just said I didn't want to have.
Next up was mackerel, in ginger-kimchi juice with basil (shredded finely enough for an Easter basket) on top. I liked this picture of the sauce better than any of the pictures of the actual dish:
As the sports announcer would say, good save by Chef Kaze! Just as I was starting to wonder if I had made a very expensive mistake, here was a near-perfect, simple and flavorful dish that was actually about the fish and not just the stuff on it. The fishy mackerel was the right fish for the tangy sauce, the citrusy brightness of the ginger-kimchi juice was the right accent to make this dish be more than basil, basil, basil; a mighty fine plate of fish there, Chef.
More tuna, with burdock root in the house-made soy sauce and a little truffle oil (which, in fact, would appear everywhere I encountered the house-made soy sauce, which means I ended the evening really having no idea what the house-made soy sauce tasted like). I mean, it's not like lots of tuna is a bad thing, and this was certainly a pretty simple preparation by the standards of the house, but I'm not sure that truffle oil is doing anything for anybody besides justifying the prices. I ended the evening unconvinced that truffle oil and fish really belong together, and having to struggle to really know what the tuna had tasted and felt like (good, but not Katsu-perfect in firmly supple texture).
West coast oyster with red bean goo on top. Not an oyster fan, as previously noted, but this was okay.
One of the problems with the multitude of toppings placed on the fish was that there were far too many for me to keep track of with photos alone. Banana peppers, garlic enoki, tuna penuche (okay, I'm joking), I just couldn't keep track of all the flavors being thrown at me. Here is, yes, tuna, with yellowtail which is a TUNA, and salmon, each topped with some damn thing, and slathered with the soy sauce and truffle oil, to the point of practically seeming like dessert sushi (how far were we, really, from tuna with whipped cream and a cherry on top?). Looking back on the meal at this point, where the most satisfactory dish had been the one with the strongest fish, I began to feel that the sauces were doing pretty good fish a disservice, making it seem bland by globbing it up and covering it up with too-strong alternative flavors instead of enhancing and sharpening it with something simple and clean.
Happily, the remainder of my meal would harken back more to the mackerel than to the less successful parts of the meal. I realize this plate of sushi looks like more of the same, but it was far more successful than its immediate predecessor, mostly finding a complementary balance between actual fish flavor and a sauce or topping, rather than reducing expensive fish to doing a job that could have been handled just as well by bread. Left to right, this was white tuna with banana wasabi (sounds silly but actually hit a nice sweet-hot note), bonito with garlic enoki puree, red snapper with a simple onion something or other on an ohba leaf (terrific, the other best thing besides the mackerel), and baby octopus "nacho" with Merkt cheddar cheese-- no, I forget what that orange stuff was, but it worked a lot better than it looks.
Incidentally, I took the opportunity to solve a long-running mystery, and asked Chef Kaze why bonito is always served seared; he said two reasons, one, it's a mushy fish and you need to sear it to get a tough enough outer edge for slicing, and two, it oxidizes quickly and searing protects the inner flesh. (He also said they will re-sear it after they close each night to preserve it for the next day, a step many restaurants don't take.)
Speaking of heat, here's the chef roasting the stuff on top of some of these items, not sure why, but it made for a nice picture:
I had begged off at this point, but Chef Kaze, seeing that I had eaten less-comfy things without whimpering (little did he know that I was a
squid guts and moss man from way back), talked me into one last item (but it's waaafer-thin!):
Eel, with maw, braised radish and a dollop of honey mustard (I failed to spot the brand as he wielded the bottle, alas). Very nice, I might have diluted the mustard in some fashion myself (but then I wouldn't throw mayonnaise around like the Japanese do, either, so it's not like the quantity was obviously wrong).
Anyway, what's my verdict on Kaze? Well, service seems to be rid of the problems people have talked about in the past, I didn't feel aggressively upsold and only ever so slightly talked down to once or twice. It was mildly disappointing to get a lot of tuna after saying I wanted more than just tuna and salmon, but since I was sitting there watching my stuff be made, I really could have stopped it if I'd felt that strongly.
My meal didn't entirely disabuse me of the idea that a lot of those sauces and toppings are there for people who don't really like raw fish in its pristine beauty. But
Bob-San proves that you can shovel out a hell of a lot of California rolls and still have serious sashimi chops when a customer actually wants you to display them; and Kaze did on occasion, too, with a few things that were quite first-rate, though as my experience shows, you may have to really hunt and choose to get things where fish and sauce enhance each other and don't merely glob the lily. I went into this a fusion skeptic, and came away impressed enough by a couple of things to accept the theory, and unimpressed by enough other things to think it's not an entirely desirable practice. I guess I'd say that, having been once, and having chatted Chef Kaze up a bit, I would be in a much better position next time to know what I wanted-- and what I don't want, which is what Kaze seems to be pretty successful at selling to a fairly packed house every night in Roscoe Village.