• 3
• Decent but mostly unspectacular food

We made a reservation for dinner at 8:00 on a Saturday night, but it turns out that we probably didn't need to - the whole time we were there, there was always at least one empty table. We ordered a bento box - which came with miso soup, salad, dumplings, a California roll, fresh fruit (which turned out to be a slice of watermelon), and a choice of main dishes from which we selected vegetable tempura - and a spicy maki combo - which came with three mock fish sushi rolls (California, salmon, and tuna) and more miso soup. The soup, which was served to us very quickly, tasted just fine but was nowhere near hot enough. The salad was good and fresh. The dumplings tasted all right but were somewhat soggy. The vegetable tempura (broccoli, zucchini, and white-flesh sweet potatoes) was excellent - crisp and not greasy at all. The watermelon was watermelon. The sushi, which was the thing I was most looking forward to trying here, was, for me, the biggest disappointment. I've only really started eating sushi since I've been veg*n, so I've come to think that a large part of the difference between good sushi and bad sushi is texture - whether the textures of the nori, the rice, and the vegetables are all well matched or not. The California rolls were all right in this respect, since California rolls are mostly vegetables anyway. The spicy tuna and spicy salmon rolls were far less good - they were both filled with a sort of homogeneous paste that was far too mushy to have any business being inside a sushi roll - to the point where it was a bit difficult even to pick up the pieces with chopsticks without squirting all the filling out. Still, at $12 for the bento box and $14 for the sushi combo, it was worth a try. Service is friendly, the space is attractive (we were seated right by the enormous fish tank), and the food was elegantly presented. I did notice that most of the other customers were eating things other than sushi. Maybe they knew something we didn't. If I find myself back in New York, I might go here again - and order something different.