Kaz Sushi Bistro, Washington, D.C.

With the proliferation of the ubiquitous sushi bar in nearly every pan-Asian restaurant around the country, Japanese food has started to become common and mundane. A few places, though, maintain the tradition of food as art so highly prized in Japan, and it can be particularly exciting when Japanese chefs trained both in the cuisine of their homeland and the cuisine of the West fuse the styles into creative Japanese-American dishes; thus is our restaurant choice earlier tonight, Kaz Sushi Bistro in downtown D.C.'s West End.

Kaz is located on the upper level of a storefront near the Uruguayan Embassy. The decor is simple with classic Japanese lines and furnishings; Japanese-style watercolors of fish decorate the walls. As expected from a Japanese restaurant, service was speedy, quiet, and efficient.

My dinner companion started with a grilled baby octopus appetizer. I sampled one of the little octopi and it was tender, tasty, and had a spicy kick to it. The photo below is a little misleading, since the dish was served in a square bowl, not a plate, and there was more to the serving than it appears. In the bottom of the bowl was a fine julienne of pickled carrots and daikon (Japanese radish), and scallion sprouts garnished the top.



For her next course, she chose several different types of sushi, including clockwise from the top left, a spicy tuna roll, eel, salmon, and uni (sea urchin). I noticed that the gari (pickled ginger) looked very pale and fresh.



I selected the unadon bento box for my meal. This included two big pieces of barbecued unagi (eel) on a bed of Japanese rice, with a seaweed side dish, a clear vermicelli and mushroom dish, some light vegetable tempura, and an American-style tossed green salad in a creamy sesame dressing. The unagi was good, but I especially enjoyed the seaweed and the vermicelli.



Our desserts turned out to be wonderfully creative and memorable. My friend had the green tea tiramisu. A thin layer of cake was covered with a strongly green tea flavored mascarpone cheese mousse and garnished with a tiny dice of cherry jelly; a red bean paste was squirted decoratively on the plate.



I had the lychee panna cotta with mango sorbet, which was excellent. Both of the fruit flavors exploded in the mouth and complemented one another well.



We also had some very interesting Japanese wines with our meal. We each had one of the two sake tasting flights, each with three different cups of ice cold sake. We both thought that our favorite sake of the flight was our respective "light" wine; the other wines were good, too, and their flavors differed widely, including one of mine which had been aged in cedar casks and had a very peppery flavor.



With dessert, we both had a glass of choya, a very traditional Japanese plum port wine. Our waitress brought a tray to the table with a glass for each of us that contained a small, green, Japanese plum and a large plum-filled decanter with the choya, which she poured for us tableside. The wine was sweet and syrupy and had an intense but pleasant green plum flavor and also a flavor with reminded me somewhat of red hot candies without the "hot."



Kaz ranks highly on my sushi bar list in D.C., up with one of my favorites, Sushi Taro. I'm looking forward to a return trip to Kaz to try out some of their many larger tasting menus, including eight-course gourmet samplers of the cold and hot "small dishes" featured by Chef Kaz Okochi (who we saw in the dining room tonight visiting with one of the other large tables). These small dishes give the chef the opportunity to fuse Japanese cuisine with American tastes, and he does it with skill and aplomb.