Sauced in Translation

Kaizan's menu is both polished and perplexing.

by Trey Popp

Michael T. Regan STICKY SITUATION: Kaizan's compelling Gosai roll features baked tuna, scallop and salmon dressed in a spicy sauce. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

If every menu tells a story, Kaizan's is of a piece with the splintered and contradictory narratives of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. "Kaiseki-ryori," it tells us of its specialty, "is an artistic Japanese seasonal cuisine." But wait, it's also a "light meal" crafted for fasting Buddhist priests. It was originally vegetarian, we learn, but modernity has made meat and seafood kosher. Provided it accompanies a tea ceremony, of course. After all, "It was thought that the tea would taste better if the people weren't starved."

There aren't many restaurants that reference starvation on a menu that includes a deep-fried cone of lobster and tuna. But then neither are there many ascetic religious traditions that have given birth to 18-course feats of gastronomic revelry.

Confused yet?

Slotted into the space that used to house The Smoked Joint, Kaizan is a sprawling restaurant more than a year in the making. Some of the preparation shows. The midsize wine list is better than almost any other you'll find at a Japanese place — and it includes plenty of juice that plays well with raw fish and wasabi. (When's the last time you saw enough Gruner Veltliners to merit their own category?) The interior is a lot classier than in its previous incarnation, with gorgeously earthy ceramic tableware to match.

Plenty of the kitchen's creations also show evidence of long conceptual fermentation — sometimes to the point of being overwrought. When Kaizan opened in late December, one of their special maki rolls came topped with gold leaf.

But by the time I walked through the door several weeks later, the gold was gone — along with much of the original menu. The nine-course kaiseki option had been replaced with a choice of five or seven courses. (The original thought had been to serve 18, but that simply took too long and cost too much.) Meanwhile, the list of teas — still trumped as the sine qua non of kaiseki cuisine — had vanished.

Without tea but with a superb Pinot Noir from Australia, which isn't known for them, I tried the five-course version. It varies nightly but the courses keep the same names: Invigorate, Sashimi, Broiled, Rice & Soup, and Dessert. (The seven-course path adds Intro and Steamed.)

The first course was invigorating, indeed. Two scallops came cloaked in the connective tissue that usually gets tossed aside with the shells. The last time I'd seen the whole shebang, I was shoveling them by the hundred from the freezer hold of a scallop boat in Queensland. The Kaizan experience was considerably more gourmet, especially since they were accompanied by tender morsels of Chilean sea bass and confetti-breaded shrimp.

The fish was the tastiest thing on the plate, but it's hard to enjoy eating an animal that's on the precipice of extinction. Chefs across the country have been boycotting the drastically overfished species for several years now; so have a lot of eaters. Delicious as it was, paired with a subtle dipping broth, I wished my waiter would have given me a chance to opt for a more ethical option. (And been less stingy with the wine pours, too.)

The sashimi featured impeccable slices of salmon, tuna and white tuna. But after that, the gears began to catch. The "Broiled" course consisted of an extremely hot stone upon which to sear four thin slices of raw Kobe beef, some tasty Japanese mushrooms, and way-out-of-season zucchini. But the first couple of beef slices stuck like glue to the stone, which soon cooled down too much to do more than warm the last veggie bits. The miso soup and sushi rice that came next were tasty enough, but not exactly the stuff of a $55 meal. Dessert was factory-made mochi ice cream.

Another meal, ordered a la carte, offered different sorts of pleasures — and one disappointing misstep.

Seaweed salad passed the test. A satisfying chirashi plate blended sashimi with pretty fronds of baby Swiss chard, crab, sweet peppers and rice beneath a spicy sauce that seemed more Korean than Japanese. Better still was the Gosai roll, a great log of baked tuna, scallop and salmon dressed with a sauce just spicy and acidic enough to punch up the comfort food into something more compelling.

Japanese eel and avocado wrapped in tuna, on the other hand, undershot its considerable potential. The tuna was too thick for the featherweight portion of eel, and the sea of mayonnaise underneath completely overwhelmed the delicate, beautiful sprigs of fresh wasabi greens tucked into the rolls. I had the feeling that more finesse in the kitchen would have made this a superb addition to my kaiseki meal.

Then again, I'm still not sure what kaiseki cuisine is really all about. Kaizan is not without its merits, but coherence is not yet one of them.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Kaizan: Modern Japanese Cuisine

Academy House, 1420 Locust St.

215-735-1144

thekaizan.com

Hours: Sun.-Thu., 4-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 4-11 p.m.; closed Monday.

Small plates, $3-$22; Large plates, $18-25; Prix fixe, $55-$75

Valet parking available.