Rahu: I Forgot I Kinda Liked Hipster Sushi

Rahu

Sisowath Quay

10 Sisowath Quay

Tel: 023 215 179

Hipster sushi makes up roughly 80% of the diets of Northern Californians, and I'm pleased to announce that Phnom Penh now has an entry into the field. Restaurant chain Metro has opened a sushi outpost next to Harem Shisha Bar and the Riverhouse Lounge, with sushi and Japanese specialities added on to the standard Metro menu.

The dark, moody, and aggressively hip decor - yes, I'll mention the Angry Monk Kid painting in the back corner, let's stop talking about it now - is set off by extremely attractive and somewhat attentive wait-staff. Where Rahu really shines is after 11:00 PM, when the sushi menu is discounted by 50%. In fact, I've never actually eaten at Rahu before the discount hit.

In a city where late-night food can be limited—if you're not brave enough to risk food stalls and gastrointestinal ruin—this late night sushi can be something of a blessing, especially if you're not really that into greasy hangover prevention chow. Rolls top out at around $5 and most are in the $3.50 area. It's a pretty good deal for the tastiest sushi I've had in town. The menu is not particularly extensive, but all the bases are covered, with sushi rolls, sashimi, and some other Japanese classics on offer.

The spicy salmon rolls are my favorite here. The legitimately spicy salmon interior is wrapped in rice which is studded with small, crispy tempura bits. It's finished with a not-excessive drizzle of wasabi mayo and is really a pretty perfect light meal or late-night snack. I used to bitch about California sushi's obsession with sauces, but now I miss them. A lot.

The simple tuna roll is executed beautifully here - fresh tuna, perfectly rolled, seaweed that isn't too chewy. No sauces to accompany here, which is as it should be for one of Japanese cuisine's more perfectly simple creations.

Salmon, asparagus, and cream cheese is another classic California-style roll that is just about impossible to find in Cambodia. I really like this roll - creamy cheese, some subtlety unctuous salmon, a bit of green onion, some crisp asparagus, and a smidgen of spicy sauce. Rich without making you feel sort of awful about yourself. Which is not the point of sushi.

There's also beef with red ants rolls on the menu. These are especially fun if you can order these when your friend is in the bathroom, than pass it off as something totally benign. That joke never gets old.

Don't forget to ask the waitstaff to bring you some of Rahu's home-made potato chips to go with your sushi and alcoholic beverages. They're seasoned with something delicious and are, in my opinion, far superior to the sweet n' salty peanuts usually on offer with beer in Cambodia.

Be aware that a service charge is tacked onto the bill whether you like it or not - keep this in mind before embarking on some sort of PM sushi binge. It's true that Rahu would be somewhat obnoxiously chic if it wasn't here, but as things currently stand in PP, it's kinda nice to be able to get California-style sushi late at night at an aggressively hip restaurant where the waitstaff aren't particularly nice to you. It reminds me of home.

Happa: Excellent Japanese Teppanyaki in Phnom Penh

Happa
#17, Street 278
Phnom Penh
Tel: 077749266

I realized recently that the restaurants I eat at the most here in Phnom Penh are rarely the ones I review. Something about incredible familiarity makes me less likely to go ahead and haul the camera with me and do the review - so I'm glad I finally got around to Happa, a great little Japanese/Khmer teppanyaki joint on backpacker-beloved street 278.


Happa's pork stir-fried with sesame.

The menu focuses on Japanese small plates, prepared in front of you on the restaurant's big iron griddle, which makes for some rather interesting visuals and assurance that you're getting pretty fresh food. There's sauteed small plates of meats and vegetables, main-course dishes with steak, pork, and lamb, salads and fried specialities, and even Japanese pizza or "okonamayaki," a cabbage and flour pancake topped with bacon and cheese.



The teriyaki chicken here is excellent, nice and tender and not too salty, with some dark meat bits thrown in, which I infinitely prefer. I like to eat this with the oyster mushrooms sauteed in butter.



I'm also a big fan of the fresh tofu salad, which has soft tofu, seaweed, sesame and lettuce tossed in a vinegary-heavy dressing. A nice light stomach-friendly meal. My only complaint with Happa is that the cooks sometimes take too heavy a hand with the salt-shaker, but the issue seems to have been weeded out in the last month or two.



Vegetarians will enjoy Happa's turn with tofu - seems like there's fifteen different tofu based dishes on the menu, all using soft local tofu. The tofu steak with basil and chili is a Khmer-accented take and is pretty excellent - not TOO soft - served with Happa's griddle-fried potatoes (my boyfriend is an addict) and some sauteed vegetables. As far as main courses go, the pork cutlet topped with cheese and mushrooms, served with potatoes and veggies, is also excellent at $6.00.



Grilled Japanese eggplant is on special here sometimes. I can't say I find it too different from Khmer style grilled eggplant, other than perhaps the slightly sweet, slightly vinegary sauce on top, but it's still a good and distinctly smoky dish.

There's also a couple pages of classic Khmer dishes near the back if you're interesting in mixing your East Asian with your Southeast Asian. If you get there in time, Happa often has sushi rolls and sashimi featuring the fish of the day—comfortingly for those inclined to distrust raw fish in a third-world nation, they often run out.

The friendly wood-accented dining area is a casual spot to drink a beer or a glass of wine while waiting for your food - no one is attempting to hustle you out of the restaurant here, and its quiet location makes it possible to have a decent conversation here while enjoying some cooler dry season weather.

Happa's owners also play fantastic music, which is a real asset in a land where restaurant music trends more towards the ear-gratingly horrible. I hear New Orleans tracks I don't encounter outside of the Crescent city at Happa, as well as excellent Delta blues, jazz, and soul music. Someone with excellent taste in American music is obviously in charge of the audio here.

My dad notes many of his Japanese coworkers are rabid blues and jazz fans - Japanese readers, can you back this up?

Suzume: Homey Japanese Food in Dark Heart of Phnom Penh

Suzume
14A Street 51
092 748 393
Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh has more Japanese restaurants than I ever expected it to have, mostly due to the city's healthy (and apparently chronically starving) population of Japanese NGO workers. Most Japanese restaurants here are of the rustic variety, specializing more in curries, soups, ramen and gyoza, rather than more complicated and delicate affairs like sushi.

Expat-beloved and low-key Suzume, however, has a phone-book size menu with most standard Japanese dishes, including ramen and gyoza, a variety of tempura, and even a selection of sushi rolls.

Downside: everything is more expensive than it is at other "mid-range" Japanese places in town, including ramen at $7, which I think is a bit ridiculous in Cambodia. Bowl o' noodles, like everyone else eats here, just from Japan.



Edamame:possibly the perfect snack, tragically a bit hard to find here, or at least in the awesome pre-packaged microwave pack format you can find the stuff in Northern California. Buttery nutrient rich deliciousness, all natural, hard to object in any way.



Suzume does a pretty good turn in shrimp and vegetable tempura, which can be fried into a chewy, immense mass of suck and here is light and airy in the best Japanese fashion. Fried seaweed in batter is curiously delectable. I do not know how they turn shrimp into shrimp *poles* like this but it is rather impressive. Probably involves deveining, maybe crustacean torture, I don't know.



Vegetable gyoza are another classic - need to be light and not chewy, in the Japanese fashion (more leeway is allowed for big meaty greasy Chinese dumplings). These were filled with cabbage and chives and were quite tasty. I like the meaty variety more but one makes concessions when dining with vegetarians. (Hey, I love you guys. Cook for ya all the time. Well, used to.)



My boyfriend is sort of a Japanese curry obsessive and this is probably the most comforting of Japanese comfort foods to the expat set: mild curry, rice, and fried pork katsu on top. Great for cold weather (if we had any) and excellent if you're: 6'6, working on a construction site, or have recently suffered from a bout of weight-loss causing sickness. Since most foreigners here often experience #3, fire away. Japanese people: is this also Comfort Food of Choice? Suspect so for many.



Tuna rolls are a simple but delicious affair, and these use nice fish and are well-rolled, which is often an issue with sushi in Cambodia.

Admittedly: I spend my days at the Khmer Rouge War Tribunal of late and sometimes day-dream about asking the anti-materalist anti-Western Communist leaders of yore - "Hey, did you know bunches of expats dine on Japanese imperialist food at rather high prices in your very own capital? Suck on it!"

I will never get a chance to do this but it's kind of a dream.



My personal favorite: eel and cucumber rolls. These were quite good, and had a nice fresh, sweet, nicely unctuous flavor. Simple sushi rolls are something I miss very much from the US. Had I known I would miss Tulane University cafeteria sushi so much. In any case, these rolls fill the void in my heart, and there's no "service charge" like that surprise tacked on at Rahu. Tasty as Rahu's sushi may be.

Shabu Shabu and Sushi Buffet: Raw bacon on a conveyor belt!!!

Shabu Shabu and Sushi Buffet
City Mall Shopping Center
Sothearos Boulevard
855 12 208 383



Food served on a conveyor belt has always held a profound fascination for me. Admittedly, a lot of people really enjoy eating food in motion - maybe it appeals to our primitive hunting instincts, grabbing moving plastic trays of food. Phnom Penh, in yet another indication of its growing economic power (or something) now has its own place to get food on a conveyor belt: Shabu Shabu and Sushi Buffet.



My boyfriend is really tall and chronically hungry so the word "buffet" tends to get our attention. At Shabu Shabu, you pay $7.80 for 80 minutes of stuffing your face, which is a pretty good deal by Phnom Penh standards. You're led to a table and given a choice of broth for your personal-sized hotpot.

You then grab raw ingredients off the belt and dump them in the soup. Simple enough. There's also an assortment of sushi, cold dishes, some hot stuff (spring rolls and the like), ice cream, soda, and other food products. The decor is somewhere between Asian-futuristic and 50's buffet, with sappy Khmer music playing in the background. Personally, I find it rather charming. You can also mix up your own dipping sauces which is always endlessly entertaining for me.



The sushi is only okay, but there's a lot of it and they do make an effort to keep the variety up. If you are like my boyfriend and messily devour all of the crab-stick and shrimp sushi as soon as they set it out, they'll probably stop making it for a while. "They see me COMING," he's started to complain to me. Ah, Sushi Buffet, thou art a cruel mistress.

Admittedly, they may not be equipped for the appetites of 6'6 22 year olds at Shabu Shabu. The shabu-shabu element is quite tasty, mainly because shabu shabu is pretty hard to screw up due to its rather simple, interactive nature. There's usually a healthy variety of raw ingredients, some of them amusingly difficult to identify for your average Westerner. (WHAT ARE THOSE CRACKER THINGS I DON'T EVEN).

On the whole, the Shabu-Shabu Sushi Buffet is an entertaining change from the usual in Phnom Penh, as long as you're not out to experience the Art of Sushi or anything and derive as much pleasure as I do from grabbing little plates of uncooked bacon off a conveyor belt. Just don't stay past 80 minutes. You won't like what happens.

Okay, they actually just charge you a few bucks more, but it sounds cooler like that.

The Sake Cafe: Yet More New Orleans Sushi! SHOCK AND HORROR

Sake Cafe
2830 Magazine St
New Orleans, LA
504 894 0033

The Sake Cafe. Yep, it's more sushi in New Orleans. I know you're shocked. The Sake Cafe seems to be pitching itself up as an upmarket date place, and that's reflected in the ultra-hip decor and the hordes of highly dressed thirty-somethings gazing into one another's eyes over plates of sashimi. (Yes, we CAN pretend we actually live in upper Manhattan instead of in a malarial but curiously delightful swamp! Joy!)



We checked out the Uptown Roll ($14.00) with spicy scallops and "crunchies" inside, and chopped tuna, salmon, and yellowtail on top with tobiko and scallions. I am not sure what the national fascination with tempura "crunchies" is- unless it is simply proving that Americans really dig deep fried things - but they have found their way into almost every sushi roll in this country. I've made my peace with them. Crunchy things aside, this was a pretty good roll - the combination of cool interior and hot, richly scallop-y topping was very good.




We tried the curiously titled Never Bored Tuna ($13.00) with sliced torched tuna, cucumber, and chili sauce with masago and scallions. This was a fairly pedestrian seared tuna - sorry bout' the name- but was composed of high quality fish and was a pleasant enough variant on the theme. How many ways can sushi restaurants think of to jazz up seared tuna?




We tried the assorted sashimi ($22.00) with tuna, salmon, yellowtail, white fish, octopus, surf clam, and crabstick. Sashimi lives and dies by freshness, and this was certainly very fresh, and a nice combination of different fish varieties. The Sake Cafe has a bitching shaved ice (snoball) machine for this kind of stuff. It's behind the sushi bar. Sort of mesmerizing. (Why aren't there seafood flavored snoballs on the menu? Okay, don't answer that).




Last up were the Screamer Oysters ($7.00), fresh oysters sauteed with garlic chili sauce and served with warm bread. The buttery sauce had a good flavor with a boatload of chili sauce, but was actually too hot: made it difficult to taste the oyster. I am a bit of a stud about hot food so these guys are definitely stepping on it. Would be a real standout dish if they kicked it down just a teeny little notch or two.

Verdict: the Sake Cafe is New Orlean's most atmospheric choice for sushi, although the food isn't particularly superior to the other joints in town - in other words, it's pretty good. Keep it in mind for occasions when you want to dress up and eat raw fish like all good urbanites should.

Ninja Sushi: YES IT'S MORE SUSHI IN NEW ORLEANS

Ninja Sushi
8433 Oak Street
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504) 866-1119

Why does New Orleans have so many sushi restaurants?

This is a question that has plagued me throughout my (ending!) two years as a New Orleans resident. The Big Easy possesses a vibrant and fascinating food culture and a profusion of good restaurants, that's evident, but it does not have much in the way of Asian food. Decent Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean food are difficult if well nigh impossible to find within the central city (you get far better pickings in the burbs). But sushi? SO MUCH SUSHI. SUSHI EVERYWHERE. This can probably be attributed to the hordes of yuppies and liberal arts students that populate the Garden District, and can also be chalked up to the serious hipness that sushi has enjoyed for what, the past twenty years, and some of it can probably be credited to Louisiana's fine seafood-eating tradition. But the fact remains that New Orleans sushi restaurants are both numerous and extremely similar, with menus and focuses that could be carbon copies of one another. How the hell do they all survive? Do Tulane students really eat that many 11:00 PM spicy tuna rolls? Is there an economics major in the house, someone who could parse out this mystery, present a paper, put my worried and unsettled (oh, eternally) mind to rest?

Sorry. Anyway. Ninja Sushi on Oak Street.

Ninja is located in a rather funky building a bit past the Maple Leaf on Oak. You walk into a funky bar area and are directed to a cleverly concealed set of stairs to the main dining room. The restaurants name and the bar area are, rather sadly, misleading: the dining area is a perfectly standard issue Japanese restaurant interior. Think soft colored wood paneling and gently piped in music.

The menu is standard for NOLA sushi joints, although there are a few nods to local foodstuffs - think fried oyster rolls and okra tempura - and some interesting appetizers, such as sauteed enoki mushrooms.



I had the seafood salad, which is one of my stand-by orders at Japanese restaurants. Pretty good, although the salad at Hana is bigger for slightly less money. The fish selections were fresh and I was impressed with the variety - they could probably toss more greens and seaweed salad on this thing and pad it out without driving the price up too much.



My friend swears by the pickled wasabi (Teardrop) roll here, which I didn't try. Apparently it's wasabi distilled to its smack yo in da face essence, and judging by the reactions of my two dining companions, it went over well. Look, I apologize for the whole wasabi thing. I will eat just about anything but horseradish products are one of the very few existent flavors that don't get my motor runnin' at all. Just can't stand it. I hate the way it goes up my nose.

We tried the Moriaki roll with yellowtail, salmon, fresh tuna, green onion, smelt roe, radish sprout and avocado, which was pleasant and fresh, although not particularly exciting (but that wasn't exactly expected). An order of salmon sashimi was fresh and properly prepared. We also sampled the enoki mushrooms, which were served in an interesting soy sauce, vinegar, and ginger concoction and possessed the slimy, chewy, yet oddly compelling thang enokis have going on.

On the whole, Ninja Sushi is a nice enough NOLA Japanese joint - but it doesn't possess anything extra to set it apart from the rest of the pack. Nice enough for sushi on Oak Street, especially if you've grown sick of endless, endless Hana runs.

Kru Sushi: Sacramento's Tastiest Raw Fish

Kru
2516 J Street
Sacramento, CA 95816-4815
(916) 551-1559

Kru is Sacramento's upscale sushi emporium, shooting for a crowd more interested in nuanced flavors and a hip ambience then the Mikuni adherents. Instead of gigantic mayonnaise-drenched rolls and sake-choco-tinis, Kru is more interested in producing refined nuevo-Japanese cuisine at upscale prices, in a chilled out (if hipster-infested) setting. The place isn't always 100%, but in my opinion, it's the region's tastiest and most "serious" sushi. Check it out. On this particular visit, they were really firing on all cylinders, and we had a downright delightful meal.



One of the daily specials consisted of monkfish, Japanese mushrooms, and flash-fried piquillo peppers, an extremely Spanish influenced dish. And did it ever taste that way. I was instantly reminded of the copious amounts of monkfish I consumed over the summer in Spain and especially in the Basque country - the perfectly cooked "poor man's lobster" was complimented perfectly by a snappy pan-sear and a soy sauce glaze. Just excellent.



We tried the gorgeous sashimi tapas, the chef's choice of fish. I will say right now I cannot recall exactly what all of this stuff was, other then that it was delicious and extremely attractive. A hell of a step up from the area's usual "sashimi samplers" - shoddily cut merely-okay fish slapped on a plate. Interesting but not overpowering sauces and accompaniments? Good.



Next was the Hawaiian walu and enoki mushroom "parcel" with soy, sake, and garlic, a special that found its way onto the permanant menu due to overwhelming popularity. For good reason. A nice subtle flavor permeated both the fish and the meaty, delightfully alien-like enokis.



A special of pork belly over a wild mushroom risotto. Not particularly Asian, but certainly very tasty, with the tender, uber-fatty pork in confluence with the earthy mushrooms. The risotto was a spot too dense.



Seaweed salad. I cannot not order this stuff, I am afraid. A good version here, though real seaweed dorks should check out Kru's other seaweed salad, which features weird-ass stuff doubtless scraped off the ocean floor.

Kru was spot on during this visit, and I'm certain I'll be returning to sample their interesting food in the future. Whenever I save up my pennies, anyhow. Great sushi don't come cheap. And that's probably the way it should be.

Tofu Doughnuts

Tofu Doughnut photo from the excellent Shizuoka Gourmet blog.

So we're sitting in our office today at Tulane, and my friend Amanda started talking about really disgusting food. "Tofu dougnuts," she said. "That sounds really disgusting."

I was sitting at my laptop, and thought fast. I immediately googled "Tofu Doughnuts". I was not at all surprised to find that tofu doughnuts actually exist. In fact, there are many recipes for tofu doughnuts, many incarnations of Tofu Doughnuts. Take a look.

Fluffy Tofu Doughnuts Holes
These look all right. Tofu is mashed into pancake batter, then fried.

Tofu Doughnuts
Straight up. Exactly what it says it is. Doughnuts made with tofu. They're popular in Japan. But they also eat ice cream with fish in it in Japan. (I suppose that would be in truth be no worse then freezing a herring salad, but freezing a herring salad?)

Korean Tofu Doughnuts from Mr. Doughnut. The reviewer says they are "terrible". Well.


Does this finding indicate something particular about the Internet? I suspect it does. Does the existence of Tofu Doughnuts indicate that our universe is a diverse and fascinating place, full of infinite variety?

Will I ever eat a tofu doughnut?

.....Maybe.