No passport required
Kabuki’s new slew of multinational dishes
By Dan O'Heron 03/18/2010
Influenced by international tastes, Kabuki’s eight new dishes offer a more complete course in alimentary geography than you’ll find in any essentially Asian-inspired restaurant.
I’ve been schooled in six of the eight dishes: Italianate lasagna and yellowtail Carpaccio, Hawaiian tuna, Spanish mackerel tataki, Mexican Baja rolls and Nevada Las Vegas rolls.
My favorite plate was the lasagna roll, consisting of eight California sushi morsels gummed together by three layers of warm, melted cheese — rich, straw-colored Parmesan, sweet, delicate mozzarella and all-American cream cheese ($7.95). Sitting atop a curlicue of eel sauce, the eight morsels are stuck together, and they can’t be picked up with the traditional thumb and forefinger without making a blundering mess. Ta da! Before asking for a knife, as a tourist might, reverse chopsticks and use the sharper angled ends like a chisel to separate the pieces.
Easier to manipulate is the light and flavorful Spanish mackerel tataki packed in chopped ginger and scallops ($11.75). I also savored the yellowtail Carpaccio. Slightly bolder in flavor than albacore, it was an impressive array of filets, laid in a puddle of tangy citrus base ($8.95). The Vegas roll consisted of five tasty morsels of deep-fried crab and salmon with cream cheese and avocado ($8.95).
Each of the new items were tested in Las Vegas at the Kabuki restaurant adjacent to Mandalay Bay hotel. A tough proving ground, we’re lucky that eight sexy dishes that happened in Las Vegas didn’t stay there.
Before test-marketing, the dishes, as with almost everything on the Kabuki menu, were conceived in the test kitchen of Corporate Executive Chef Masa Kurihara. Before any dish is committed to rule and recipe, it starts with Kurihara inspiration and a muse that intones to take so much of this and so much of that.
“As a chef,” said Kurihara, “my satisfaction comes from watching our customers enjoy our food, so it is my great honor and pleasure to present a new menu that offers them even more dishes to explore.”
In Kurihara’s age of exploration, several other dishes gratified my appetite to the fullest. The Baja roll ($6.95) was a perky fusion of Latin-influenced tomato/mayo salsa, atop a spicy crab roll. The poke tuna — firmly textured bigeye — offered mixed tuna chunks and avocado cubes with shredded radish and fresh sprouts over a bed of marinated seaweed and ponzu sauce ($7.95). This is a complex delight of lemon juice, and/or rice vinegar, soy, mirin (a sweet golden rice wine), and/or sake, plus seaweed and dried bonito flakes (the most strongly flavored tuna).
In a subsequent trip I intend to savor two pieces each of Kurihara’s popular seared sushi: mackerel ($3.75), yellowtail ($4.25) and jumbo scallops ($4.25). In this “aburi-style” spin on sushi, seasoned pieces of raw fish are cut thicker than the usual nigiri style and seared with a blowtorch. Before and after torching — a flash of 10 to 15 seconds — the fish is brushed with a special soy-based sauce. Partly grilled, partly raw, the method gives the fish an attractive, slightly crackled, light-brown luster that cloaks the bright, natural color of fresh fish and the nacreous sheen of sticky rice.
How tasty? A friend, who wouldn’t eat sushi with a 10-foot chopstick, at first asking ate 10 pieces and pointed to the sky announcing his conversion.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT