Try 'em both ways it's only $5 for eight. Westerners, Kim reported, like the balls fully cooked, which gives them sort of a hush puppy feel, while Japanese customers like the center of the balls to be hot and molten. Kenny Kim and Misako Ohba sell takoyaki - golf ball-sized rounds of seasoned dough filled - on my visit, with sashimi-grade octopus or sweet corn (or both). )įreshstreet Takoyaki House: Japanese street food gets a clever spin at this tiny takeout stand in a parking lot in the arty Short North neighborhood. (Lunch weekdays dinner Monday-Saturday closed Sunday, 2800 Festival Lane, Dublin. Order the sushi by the piece and enjoy a wide spectrum of flavors and textures, from roughly textured slices of fatty tuna to sparkling salmon roe preening in their seaweed collars to richly pungent sea urchin. Basho does the usual suspects quite well, but do ask to see the a la carte menu, which features the more unusual and perhaps challenging dishes (salt-grilled beef tongue or veal liver sashimi or vinegared eel). 61.)īasho Japanese Restaurant: Our peppy server was a college student whose life and linguistic skills straddled two cultures, a fitting metaphor for a suburban restaurant that offers Japanese menus for both East and West visitors. Judging by what we tasted, there won't be any disappointment even if you order "blind." Our specials included sushi rolls made with primo pieces of fatty tuna, lotus root stuffed with shrimp and fish paste and deep-fried in tempura batter and a meaty sea urchin sauteed with yuzu rind and miso. Kihachi's list of specials is written entirely in Japanese, and do try to decipher what they are and order them. Ingredients are of the highest quality - Kimura had a new shipment of matsutake mushrooms to play with the night of our visit - and prepared perfectly. The finished dishes are gorgeous, meant to tempt the eye as well as the tongue. Kihachi Japanese Restaurant: Try to get one of the 10 or so counter seats so you can watch chef Ryuji "Mike" Kimura and sous chef Tsukasa Endo prepare the meal. Here are three ways to savor a little taste of Japan in Columbus. Consider a recent dinner enjoyed by Woolf, which included both deep-fried Atlantic pike skeleton and braised sea bream cheek during a meal at Kihachi. Japanese people, generally, are looking for Japanese food."Ĭolumbus offers an opportunity to be adventurous, to move away from the usual spicy tuna rolls, battered shrimp and sukiyaki. "As in any city where there's a sizable Japanese population, the food follows fairly fast.
"But some of the others are definitely good," Woolf said. Not all of these reach the high level set by Kihachi, cautions Bethia Woolf, owner of Columbus Food Adventures, a food tour company, and an influential Columbus food blogger with four sites to her credit ( /blog). The number of Japanese restaurants in and around Columbus ranges from 19 to at least 40, depending on who's counting, and there are dozens more if you tally restaurants under a generic "Asian" theme. Kihachi, a 19-year-old eatery tucked into a strip mall in Columbus' Northwest neighborhood, is so highly regarded that Anthony Bourdain, accompanied by food writer and author Michael Ruhlman no less, visited the restaurant for his "No Reservations" television show. And the good restaurants do indeed get better.
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