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Image 1: 03-3589-4412 1-9-15 Akasaka, Minato-ku
Closed on Sunday, mid-August and Christmas.
Located on the ground floor inside Nihon Jitensha Kaikan building across from the U.S. Embassy.
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The whole restaurant is basically just a kitchen...
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...with 8 counter seats. We reckon it's the smallest restaurant we have ever been to.
Image 4: For USD$150, you get a salad, 18 pieces of top-notch sushi, a soup, and 3 small tuna rolls.
Image 5: Once we finished the salad, the chef started making our sushi one-by-one starting with Red Snapper coated with a light soy sauce.
Image 6: Followed by yellowtail with a touch of wasabi underneath. We noticed that the chef incorporated sauce or condiment if needed so all we had to do was to pick it up with our fingers and straight into our mouth!
Image 7: Tuna - this is the lean cut from the back of the fish. We noticed that he wasted lots of fish here in order to produce the best quality sushi. He always bins the first slice of fish before making the sushi!
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Chutoro - this is the belly area of the tuna along the side of the fish.
Image 9: Otoro - this is the fattiest part of the belly area on the underside of the fish. Needless to say, it simply just melted in our mouth!
Image 10: Squid with a bit of salt and a drop of lime juice. Had a few bad squid experience in the past as it could be very chewy, but I can guarantee this wouldn't happen here!
Image 11: This was something new for us. Not just prawn, but many little sweet prawns. Definitely one of the best sushi of the meal. Don't get me wrong, they were all exceptional!
Image 12: Another great one. A huge langoustine, grilled, removed the shell using his bared hands, took out the tail, trimmed out the end, then coated with a condensed soy sauce. Whoa, the texture reflected the quality of the ingredient and his high precision of cooking. Simply beautiful!
Image 13: Sardine marinated in vinaigrette. Unlike the sardines we had before, maybe because of the marinate, it didn't have the usual strong fishy saltiness.
Image 14: Bonito. Not only was the rice perfect, we also felt the slow escalation of flavour from one sushi to the next!
Image 15: Wow! The pure fresh sweetness from the scallop was stunning and the seaweed here was remarkably thin and crispy. Impressive stuff!
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Markeral topped with chives
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Another highlight is Shako (mantis shrimp) with a touch of sweet soy sauce.
Image 18: The chef then took out a large abalone. Again, he threw away the top slice and used only the body for sushi.
Image 19: With a touch of wasabi and salt, this steamed abalone had an extremely deep flavour. We had never tasted such an intense abalone flavour before!
Image 20: Uni (sea urchin) from Hokkaido with wasabi on top. Top quality uni without any hint of bitterness. There is no need for me to elaborate more -- the quality of the ingredients here are simply the best you could get!
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Near the end of our sushi, a crunchy giant clam.
Image 22: Our final sushi, "blown-torched" anago (saltwater/conger eel) 2-way. With salt on the left and brushed with sweet soy sauce on the right, they were incredibly soft with a long delicious after taste!
Image 23: The sushi part of the meal was over, but we just noticed there were some enormous scallops. Of course, we ordered one portion.
SEE VIDEO HERE!!!
Image 24: The chef said the giant scallop was not for sushi, but to be grilled and wrapped with seaweed. Not bad but nothing too exciting.
Image 25: We repeated the baby sweet prawn sushi as it was rather unique, but we realized we couldn't taste the delicate freshness anymore after the uni and the eel. Now I realized why the chef wanted everyone to have the sushi in a particular order.
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Tuna roll in case we were still hungry.
Image 27: Seafood miso soup to wrap up our lunch.
Although an expensive and a rather short meal, but the experience from each grain of rice, each piece of fish, each drop of sauce, each touch of condiment, and the transition from one piece to another... it was sushi at perfection!
