First world whines, restaurant edition

I promised monshu I'd post a review of Boris Godunov and I full intend to honour that. But for the moment, I only feel up to reviewing some disappointing recent meals.

We had our second visit to Tanoshii yesterday and I'm just not warming to that place, which is too bad, since monshu and our supper club friends all love it. Both times, we ordered chef's choice and while I respect what Sushi Mike is trying to do, I'm not thrilled with the results. When I'm paying premium prices, I want the fundamentals to be rock solid. That starts with the rice--that's what "sushi" means, after all. But of the three rolls we had, the rice was undercooked in one and gummy in another. (Apparently that was intentional--the waitress told us it was "pressed sushi" [oshizushi]--but that doesn't change what I think about the texture.)

The other two had a certain gumminess as well, presumably stemming from the use of yuba rather than nori--but, of course, I've had yuba-rolled sushi that didn't have the same issues. The real problem, however, continues to be the abuse of spicy sauce. As I've lamented before, that's simply the style around here. And I'm fine with it in moderation, but once again he used it in every dish but dessert and a roll that was topped with Italian seasoning in truffle oil. (Yes, dried Italian seasoning from a can. The best thing I can say about that is that it washed off easily with a little soy sauce.) At some point, I stopped eating because my tongue was stinging so that I couldn't taste the fish.

The dessert, a wedge of Asian pear loaded with fatty tuna, was excellent, a perfect blend of sweet and savoury, traditional and inventive. If every dish were like that, I would understand why the chef has the reputation he does, but I'm still not sure I would enjoy eating there. The interior isn't exactly cool and sleek, the music is all 70s and 80s cheese pop, and it's a bit too "kid-friendly" for my taste. For the first hour of our meal, there was a table with three unruly toddlers near us and five minutes after they finally managed to wrangle them out the door, another couple arrived with a hyperactive four year-old.

At least that wasn't a problem at Russian Tea Time on Saturday night, but still I think that place has fallen off our list of restaurants to go to downtown. Nuphy and I were spurred to make reservations by happy memories of the zakuski we had on a previous visit; they're not on the menu any more, at least not under that name, but they were pretty much as good as we remembered. So was the first glass of hot blackberry-scented tea that came to the table. But a peek at the "balloon bread" in the breadbasket alerted us that other things had changed, and not for the better.

It didn't help that Nuphy annoyed our waitress by suggesting that she "must not be Russian" when she failed to recognise his pronunciation of "zakuski". In any case, she seemed in no hurry to get back to us despite the fact that restaurant, while rather full, wasn't really that busy. Meanwhile, the busboy refilled our glasses with tea from a carafe that was so old and oversteeped, we thought we'd been given coffee by mistake. The menu for two is as filling as ever, but the beef in stroganoff seemed tougher and the sweet-sour sauces doppler-shifted toward the cloying end of the spectrum (particularly noticeable--and unwelcome--with the cabbage roll).

I'm impressed with the long list of vodkas they serve, particularly the house-flavoured varieties. $13 for a flight of these seemed as good value. I was most keen to try the tea flavour, but I was more taken with the coriander and I found the lime good and strong (if somewhat suspiciously brightly-coloured). It was so strong, in fact, that when Nuphy complained that his ginger shot had "the heat of ginger but none of the flavour" and I added a few drops, it dominated the drink. The "pumpernickel" that accompanied these may have had substance, but it also had nuts and raisins. I wondered if I should leave them the number of a good Eastern European bakery in town.

Long winter nights

It's time to admit to myself that Henry James isn't for me, at least not at this time, and take The ambassadors out of my bag. It seemed a natural follow-up to Edith Wharton, but where her writing was easy and smooth once you got used to turns of phrase that were rather ornate to our crude modern ears his was, well, it reminded me of nothing so much as reading 19th-century German. Is that what English translations of Thomas Mann read like? I shudder to think.

Of course, my evening reading is Laxdæla saga, which could equally benefit from some severe editing. The prose is beautifully straightforward, but there's the usual epic problem of getting every new character's complete genealogy--in both directions. At least the author seems cognizant of this as she has a delightful habit of announcing when someone you've been following for over a page is leaving the story (at least in those few cases where this hasn't been made obvious by their grim termination).

But that book's too fat and heavy to drag on the shuttle, so maybe I will go ahead and dive into Carey's Jack Maggs. From the sample I read, he seems to have a handle on making the prose suggestive of Dickens without being as much of a strain to read. It also occurred to me this could be a good time to pick up O'Hara's Appointment at Samara, since what put me off before was the Christmas setting. But it's a bit early, given that the season only started yesterday. All we have up so far is a bare wreath with four burgundy candles, although I suspect more will go up this coming weekend in preparation for St Nick's.

Back to books: I made an exciting find at Amaranth today. Ever since I read the first title Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy I've been cursed by an inability to find the second volume that's been as persistent as my refusal to give up on looking for it in second-hand shops. At last, bloody-mindedness had paid off! And after a mere four years! Why, that's less than a tenth of my time on this planet so far!