07.21.08
Review of Japonais, Friday June 2008
111 E.18th St. near Park Ave., 212-260-2020
Great for: cocktails, splurging on beef, meeting people for drinks in a lovely lounge
I met Blond Hedge Funder here for our second first date (long story), and had to wait about 20 minutes in the lounge because he got stuck in traffic. Fortunately for him it was a very pleasant place to pass the time, with lovely cocktails, a whole lounge area with couches besides the bar, and one waitress so friendly I started to think/hope she might be hitting on me. I hate to be the yucky presumptuous customer though, and didn’t follow up on that before BHF arrived finally.
Our first appetizer was the rock, a thinly sliced marinated New York strip on a hot stone. The slices were surprisingly thick – I was expecting carpaccio width, so that was nice. I enjoyed the quality of the meat and the yummy, spicy, salty sauce. We also tried the sakana carpaccio of three kinds of fish. The lean tuna in chef’s special sauce with black tobiko and fluke in ponzu sauce topped by spicy radish were good but nothing special. I really liked the soy-marinated salmon in garlic sauce with spicy tobiko.
Although a lot of the other apps looked good, we stopped there to save room for the 12 oz. Akaushi (a kind of Wagyu) ribeye which is marinated in togarashi (chili pepper) and comes with a generous helping of uni butter and satsumaimo pommes frites. I can’t recommend this dish enough. The meat was fantastic, soft yet perfectly charred outside with a delicious marinade highlighting its flavors. The fries were a bit like yam fries, which I usually dislike, but they were actually pretty decent with the sauce. I loved the creamy crazy uni butter too. I calculated (completely without basis, or even numbers) that sharing 12 ounces instead of eating the whole thing myself made it ok to spread the butter all over every piece of meat I ate. Even if that’s not true, I was so happy devouring it I’m sure it all evened out.
BHF also got some sashimi, two pieces to an order, of kanpachi (a Japanese amberjack or wild yellowtail), chutoro, wasabi tobiko, otoro, zuke (soy-marinated salmon) and hamachi. He also got some nigiri with unagi and ikura. I helped him finish the fish when I was able to tear my attention away from the ribeye, and it was all very good.
The drinks are quite as tasty as the food. The Japonais caipirinha was on the special cocktail menu that day – I don’t have a note for why it was special, it may have had an interesting fruit juice. As a proud science geek, I had to try the special cocktail with Moët and watermelon molecular foam. Watermelon and Champagne should be put together more often. The great thing about the foam is that it gives you fruit flavor without the actual pulpy fruit. I also liked the Moulin Rouge - fresh muddled strawberries, Bacardi, Navan (vanilla cognac) and lime juice.
The service was very nice. Our waiter always asked how things were and told us when things were about to come out. He had an uncanny sense for that, and it couldn’t have just been acute hearing, because I think I only wondered where the next dish was aloud once. I appreciated his patience very much, too. We took a really long time to order, since we were too busy talking for quite a while, and he checked on us just enough to remind us of what we should have been doing but not so much it felt like nagging. Everyone in general was nice and seemed more or less happy to be there. And as much as I try to go only to unreviewed restaurants for you, dear reader, I might have to be naughty and sneak off to Japonais again sometime soon.
Rating: 8.5 / 10
Our cost: $300 (3 cocktails, $72 ribeye)
Noise level: noisy but tables are spaciously placed which helps
Chance of walking in: medium, just because it’s so big with two floors.
