Fly Fishing

Fat Salmon serves high-quality sushi, but it should take a few more risks.

by Adam Erace

Jessica Kourkounis SUCK IT: Fat Salmon serves amaebi, or sweet shrimp, sashimi-style, but plates their amazingly suckable deep-fried heads on the side as an added bonus.

[ review ]

If you've never sucked a shrimp skull, you're missing out on one of life's great food pleasures. Like only the holiest of sushi sanctuaries, Walnut Street's Fat Salmon serves amaebi, or sweet shrimp, with a side order of their own heads, deep-fried and anointed with maple-y eel sauce. It's a macabre scene for the squeamish, like a magic trick gone very awry, but the wise know what's up. Here's the instructional: Open mouth. Insert open end of crustacean cranium. Inhale sharply. What follows is a shotgun blast of all the best bits, sweet and rich, like shrimp mixed with foie gras. Getting this brain is almost as satisfying as receiving the other kind.

Halfway through the second head, I almost forgot about the amaebi themselves, chilling off to the side on a white platter laden with various nigiri, sashimi and a radioactive-looking roll called the Rolling Fire. The shrimp's bodies were opened like books, butterflied into pairs of glassine pink petals that glistened under the restaurant's globe-shaped pendant lights. Cool, subtly sweet and mild in an agreeable way, the meat seemed almost puritanical by comparison.

That's a fair way to describe much of the fare at Fat Salmon (née Shinju), which owner Jack Yoo relocated from Locust Street to just off Jewelers' Row (changing its name in the process) back in February. Yoo's brother, Shaun, handles the kitchen and sushi chefs, and his selection of species to slice can be as staid (tuna, salmon, eel, etc.) as it is impeccably fresh. Aficionados of exotic seafood might be disappointed — for a place named Fat Salmon, you'd think there'd at least be toro, but there's less fatty belly here than at Fashion Week.

This would be fine were Fat Salmon your run-of-the-mill California roller, but the slick, saturating design indicates the Yoos are aiming for a higher, sleeker purpose. There are no less than six types of light fixtures and four kinds of wall treatments, including elaborately patterned bronze paper; a stretch of waterless waves lit blue and red to mimic a sunset at sea; a mural; and a three-dimensional expanse of tiled square blocks that looks like something off the set of Legends of the Hidden Temple.

Aim for the seats beneath the canopy of curving pipes, sequestered from the jostle at the room-length banquette by a glass partition etched with decorative Japanese lettering. Or sidle up to the sushi bar, as I did one day for lunch. Long, smooth, matte and white, it's like a blown-up side view of a MacBook, cutout windows where the USB ports would be. A clever built-in ledge holds tiny white teapots filled with soy sauce and the BlackBerries of diamond dealers and lunching lawyers.

Here at the bar, I devoured some donburi, one of a dozen lunch specials. The heaping, broth-soaked rice bowl brimmed with onions, peppers, scallions, a continent-size pork katsu (you can get chicken, too) and a thin omelette. The egg dampened the cutlet's once-crisp breading, but I can't really complain considering the dish was just $9, and included Fat Salmon's miso soup, fragrant, musky and full of toothy wakame. That price allowed a splurge on octopus nigiri, violet-rimmed coins of snow-white tentacle draped like armchair doilies over well-seasoned sushi rice. Fat Salmon imports whole precooked tentacles I so want to turn my nose up at, but they were just too good — clean-tasting, with a bit of chew. I liked that texture on the squid, as well — the calamari graced my sashimi platter at dinner, with the added bonus of a gem of tuna tucked into each ring.

Scallops landed two ways at my dinner table, first as slippery discs of sashimi (sweet, but not as sweet as ones shucked and sliced live), then in the aforementioned Rolling Fire roll, featuring a broiled-on-top sauce as orange as a highway worker's reflective vest. "You sure?" my demure waitress asked when I ordered it. "It's really spicy." The blazing sauce certainly was as advertised, a chunky flow of red pepper paste, chili oil, mayo, crabstick and scallop globbed onto a roll-up of shrimp tempura and cucumber. It's one of 27 specialty maki, each outfitted with deliciously silly names (Lipstick Trace, Miss Sake Bomb) and unconventional additions. Mr. French Kiss' masago/crabstick base gets a crown of tres-chic bacon and tartar sauce; there's a fiesta of pico de gallo and sour cream atop the White Forest. For the signature Fat Salmon maki, Yoo rolls cucumber, tomato and cream cheese, then lays salmon over top ... with applesauce.

A bit more traditional was the tempura. It's particularly crunchy here, evidenced by a basket of frittered veggies (or, as the menu calls them, "vege") that included peppers, string beans, broccoli florets and buttery sliced yams the size of Creamsicles.

Fat's shumai were fly, featuring dainty gumdrops of sweet ground shrimp bandaged in wispy skins, and I loved the giant bowl of udon soup, which had a flavor just as deep as the near-bottomless vessel it came in. They serve the pot — brimming with elastic noodles, meaty shiitakes, tofu, fish cakes and soy- and mirin-enhanced dashi kombu broth — with a shaker of shichimi togarashi, the Japanese seven-spice blend that electrified each spoonful with a complex, savory heat.

Makes you wonder what else they could do with a little more fire — currently, the only cooked items are the appetizers and lunch dishes. Fat Salmon may be a dime piece, but strictly-sushi spots are a dime a dozen. Man cannot live on raw fish alone. Time will tell if Fat Salmon can.

(adam.erace@citypaper.net)