Psst: I hate super-rolls. Caterpillar rolls, dragon rolls, rolls wrapped in eel and stuffed with avocado, rolls wrapped in avocado and stuffed with eel, spicy tuna rolls, spicy crunchy salmon rolls: they all taste exactly the same–which is to say, of avocado. Now, I like avocado as much as anybody, but come on. I am here for the fish: the cheap cuts of octopus and squid (sweet, rubbery and my hands-down favourite); the tuna belly; the honeyed, metallic sea urchin. What are you here for, America? To dissolve wasabi paste in soy sauce; to make a mouth-puckeringly salty fondue that blurs the flavour of everything you are eating; to make fatty fish like salmon and tuna fattier with avocado and mayonnaise.

Aaagh!

I’m not saying that Tenjaku is the best sushi restaurant ever. It’s not even the best sushi restaurant in Hong Kong. The best sushi restaurant in Hong Kong was a pristine place called Kanetanaka, which closed in 1998, the same year I graduated from high school. As far as lasting impressions go, I still remember everything they put in their deluxe chirashi sushi bowl, but don’t ask me to recite the formula for quadratic equations.  (I’ve just learned from the Kikkoman website that Kanetanaka was the first Japanese restaurant to open in Hong Kong. How sad that this wonderful place, staffed with slow-moving waitresses in full, authentic kimono, is no longer with us.) Another good one, which existed until quite recently, was Sakaegawa (website in Chinese, with photos), in the basement of the Ritz Carlton. I was taken there in my mid-teens for a mind-blowing omakase that I still remember with stunning clarity, from the seaside tableau composed entirely of edible elements, to the moldy preserved persimmons and two unforgettable otoro hand-rolls. (Because the chef was a master, the seaweed and rice were every bit as buttery as the tuna belly: no real distinction between the individual components of his temaki.) It was a family event, but–I can say this now–the experience was out-of-this-world sexy.

I think my growing up in Hong Kong has spoiled me for sushi. To me, an omakase is an intimate conversation between the chef and his customer, who are facing one another and separated by inches. In New York, it often means a expensive set menu that you have no foreknowledge of. No. A chef should be wooing me, noting my reaction to the last dish before settling on the next one. It should be off the cuff and not the same predetermined prix fixe being served to every other omakase sucker at the sushi bar. I haven’t had a lot of money for food this year, so when I plonked down a moderate chunk of it at the much-raved-about Taro in Flatbush to get six or seven courses that I was rushed through without a nod of acknowledgement from the (very handsome) chef, Yuji Sano, I kind of gave up. I kept eating sushi, but stopped expecting anything at all.

I don’t know what it is about mid-range sushi in New York. Maybe the health code, requiring sushi chefs to wear plastic gloves while shaping their nigiri, is desexualizing the whole thing. At Tenjaku, I remembered what it was like to see agile, naked hands shaping rounded blocks of rice. And what rice! Do you ever bite into a piece of sushi and struggle to get a single mouthful of fish and rice without pulling off the entire strip of fish, without having half the rice escape your chopsticks and bellyflop into your soy sauce, or both? At Tenjaku, as at any good Japanese restaurant, the fish is pliant and tooth-tender, the hand-warmed rice just bound without being gummy, and the resistance of both components equal. Like the Sakaegawa hand-roll of distant memory, a nigiri at Tenjaku is not a piece of fish that happens to be presented on an oblong of rice, but a single, harmonious unit. After years of giving up and going straight for the sashimi, I have a renewed appreciation for the part played by sushi rice.

Which is a lucky thing, since rice is most of what Tenjaku still has going for it. Imagine walking into a beloved restaurant for the first time in four years to discover that prices are not only no higher, but have, in fact, been slashed. My old favourite, the HK$180 (US$23) fatty toro bowl–sushi rice topped simply with otoro, chopped to a paste, and a raw quail’s egg–now goes for HK$110 (US$14). The sushi set I ordered this time, which includes five pieces of nigiri, a small bowl of chirashi rice (pictured below), a pasta appetizer, two rolls without fish, chawanmushi, watermelon, pickles, miso, and coffee or ice cream, cost the equivalent of US$13.

It wasn’t perfect, to be sure. The chawanmushi, tender and sweet with dashi, was lukewarm. There was no question of the fish on the chirashi sushi not being fresh, but it was fatty end cuts, bits of silvery skin intact, roughly cubed. The tamagoyaki (sweet omelet) was greying. I don’t know if we were simply getting the dregs of a busy lunch service (we arrived at nearly 2pm), but this is not the Tenjaku I remember, although the head sushi chef is the same. And still, it was the best Japanese meal I have had in years, with proper miso, to be sipped leisurely throughout the meal and lidded in between sips, and perfect sushi rice.

I was happy.

Now that I am back in New York, I am coveting the $150 kaiseki at Tribeca’s Rosanjin. Has anyone been there? I am looking for clean, Kyoto-style food without glazes, mayonnaises, ponzu overload or sesame-crusted anything. Recommendations welcome!

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