.:mmmm…sushi:.
1. this one would be for all of you that might be coming for a visit here to austin anytime in the future.
2. this one is also for all of those that live in austin that have not been to this great sushi restaurant…
let’s start out with the fact that last night i had one of those, ‘i live in one of the coolest cities in the country’ feelings very strongly. it’s not in my head, and it’s not because it happens to be the city that ‘I’ live in. it just…is. i’m fairly certain that if you were to not like austin, you’d be some kind of communist or some kind of social retard.
we went and had a great dinner followed by an evening of cool cultural entertainment. we saw an amazing capoeira demonstration, an entire steel drum band mainly comprised of high school students and a huge samba troupe (which one of my friends at work participates in). this entire even was at what is a coffee house, but it’s a HUGE coffee house called ‘ruta maya‘, and it was extremely well attended.
anyway, so yesterday as i was driving home, i took another route to get around the horrific i-35 (one if the only really negative things about austin). that route brought me around to 6th street, and 6th street happens to be one of the main drags for entertainment and such. as i was driving towards my destination, i noticed a sushi place around the 300 block of 6th called ‘maiko‘, and decided that this was where we’d have dinner. since moving here, i’ve eaten at a couple of pretty decent sushi places, but i hadn’t found one yet that was either close or a place that i’d like to frequent. maiko looked like a cool place from the outside, and i was craving some sushi…
so we went there, and it was, quite honestly, beyond all of our wildest expectations.
now let me qualify this statement. i’ve/we’ve not eaten at a lot of sushi places all over the country. as a matter of fact, most of my sushi experiences are all in cincinnati, oh. and there are definitely some good places (or what i thought were good places…until last night…). i hadn’t even really started liking sushi until probably about 4 or 5 years ago. i’m telling you this to give you perspective on my ’sushi palette’, because maybe i might be giving you a little bit of a skewed review.
so let’s start with the fact that maiko is a really cool, hip, modern art decco’d place on the inside. there are a lots of nice modern flourishes without being too over the top. there was a DJ spinning relaly good trip-hop style electronic stuff that wasn’t too ovewhelmingly loud, and the crowd there seemed mostly younger. we were asked if we had a reservation, said no, and were told that we could either sit at the sushi bar or the main bar area. this wasn’t a problem, as either one of us really mind sitting in places like that. we chose the sushi bar.
i’m not going to go into greater detail than that because i mainly want to concentrate on how absolutely blown out of the water i was by our food. i cut my “sushi teeth” on rolls, and so that is mainly what i’ve ordered over the past years. while i can eat the nigiri, i tend to not get it too much just because i have to be in the right mood. so when we ordered, we got a spider roll, something called an ‘orange dragon roll’, and, because we liked the general vibe of the place and the sushi chef that was serving us was nice, i decided to just let him make a roll of his choice for us. so daring!
the first two came out pretty quickly, and upon taking the first bite of the orange dragon, but of us were about ready to fall out of our chairs it was so good. i think i remember the roll being made of tuna, avocado, crab, and some kind of spicy orange sauce…and it literally melted in my mouth. it was so incredibly fresh and had absolutely no fishy aftertaste. nor was it in the least bit chewy. upon trying that, we went to the spider roll and were equally amazed as to how it tasted. again, not too heavy, not too overly fried…big with just enough of the right ingredients. i would say we went through the two of those rolls in a couple of minutes without a problem. this is not a normal occurence for christ; while she likes sushi, she doesn’t like it quite as much as i do…
then came our sushi chef ’s (his name was kyle) creation. he told us when he served the first two, ‘i save the best for last’…and he wasn’t kidding. out comes this huge, beautiful roll that was wrapped in rice or soy paper (it was white). upon asking what it was, he called it ‘the panty dropper’. yeah, not exactly the most asian name or anything like that, but it didn’t really matter, because if i were wearing panties, they would have been around my ankles.
i can’t even begin to tell you how good this thing tasted. i cannot remember exactly everything that went into it, but remember him saying that it was a blend of tuna, shrimp, crab, salmon and a couple of other things all mashed together in the middle. then the outside was some other kind of fish topped with cream cheese and a little bit of sauce and then wrapped in the rice paper. the results were something like a dinner/desert taste that was extremely rich and unique
after going through that, i then decided that i wanted to try a couple of pieces of nigiri just to compare them to what i’d had before. i got snow crab and smoked salmon, and those went down as easily as all of the rest…perfectly prepared, perfectly fresh with no hint of aftertaste.
all of this was washed down with a glass of fat bastard shiraz. after it was all said and done, i would have to say it was one of the best meals i’ve had in a long time. you know when you leave a place pleasantly filled with an ever-so-slight buzz that you’ve had an awesome culinary experience. it was little on the expensive side, but i would say it was worth every penny i spent.
so…props to kyle, american sushi chef with a mohawk. if you all decide to go to maiko, please be sure to ask for him. he’s a really cool guy and a very talented sushi chef. i can promise you you can’t go wrong with him. i would also recommend grabbing a reservation; as we were leaving it was definitely getting packed.
three cheers for maiko! woohoo!
