vintner

I've eaten at Ino Sushi over 250 times, so I've had a chance to see Inoue-san interacting with thousands of his customers, asian and non-asian (I'm non-asian). Inoue-san goes out of his way to please every customer, asian or non-asian, who knows basic etiquette for a good sushi bar. I've seen thousands of very happy customers gush their appreciation. The only people I've ever seen Inoue-san deflate are those who pretend to knowledge that they really don't have, or who are loud and rude. I've seen customers (asian and non-asian) come in and say frankly that they don't know a lot about sushi but would like to learn, and be treated with great kindness. I've seen customers come in and be able to discuss exactly which muscle in the neck of a tuna a specific bit of toro comes from, and be treated with equal care. You can get equally good sushi whether you order in English or in Japanese. There are some ways to go wrong at Ino Sushi, or equally at any classic sushi bar. (1) Ino Sushi is a beautiful oasis of quiet and manners, with fresh flowers and calligraphy. It's a mistake to talk loudly, or to let your celphone ring (or, worse, to answer it without going out). When you go in, wait in the tiny lobby to be welcomed and invited into the slightly-larger sushi-bar area. It's a mistake to be disrespectful to the server (who in this case happens to be Mrs. Inoue), or to be impatient about getting your sushi (Inoue-san will ask you when it's your turn). It's a mistake to try to sit in the middle of a group of empty chairs; with only nine seats at the bar, you should sit right next to someone else to leave contiguous empty seats. Quiet manners count for much, and throwing your weight around counts for nothing. (What a wonderful contrast to so many other restaurants!) (2) Ino Sushi is a classic operation that serves what Japanese sushi bars traditionally serve--and nothing else. It's no use to get huffy when you can't get tempura rolls (nor tempura), or softshell crab rolls, or strange rolls involving cream cheese or made in the colors of football teams. In fact, hosomaki rolls have a very small place in good sushi; if you think of rolls as most of what you want, and you like a lot of good spicy jalepeno peppers in them, Ino Sushi is not for you. (3) Ino Sushi (and its patrons) take sushi etiquette seriously, and are offended by elementary mistakes. It's not right to fill up your soy sauce dish and then ask for globs of extra wasabi to mix into it (the wasabi is applied when sushi is made); it's not right to dip the rice into soy sauce (only the topping), much less to set down a piece of sushi in the soy sauce to soak; it's not right to try to eat a piece of sushi in several bites, scattering it over the counter; it's not right to dip into soy sauce something which already has its own sauce. If you use too much soy sauce, or mix wasabi into it, or dip the rice part, you can't expect to get good sushi served to you. If you try to cover your ignorance by loudly saying that you like it that way, you are digging your own grave, and you'd be happier elsewhere. (4) The most subtle way to go wrong I've seen several times, usually practised by non-asians. The customer comes in and affects the "old Asia hand" manner. He loudly claims to love great sake, but orders an inferior sake off the list rather than one of the good ones (Inoue-san gives excellent advice if asked). He boasts about all the places he's had sushi, and wonders when Nobu will come to San Francisco. He praises a fish that is good but ordinary, and fails to notice a fish that is exceptional. He refuses the offer of some house-made specialty. Then he orders some rare sushi item that he thinks Ino-san won't have, claiming to like it very much "although most Americans can't stand it". The joke is that Ino-san will indeed have it (he has vast stores refrigerated under the counters) and will serve up a good bowl of it, watching while the customer chokes it down. It's really a mistake to pretend to more knowledge than one has. (4A) For some reason, when one of these customers sits next to me, he always leans over and says conspiratorially, "where do you go to get really good sushi?" I always answer "here". The customer then goes on to praise other places, which both I and Inoue-san know are not great at all. It's a very rude topic. I once was seated next to Alice Waters at Chez Panisse; I did not lean over to her table and say, "Hey, Alice, where do you go when you want some good grub?" All of the (few) classic sushi bars are ideally places for regulars, where the customer's personal preferences can be catered to; you can't really put a sushi bar on a printed menu, or recite it on demand. Inoue-san has dozens of seasonal items in the course of a year, sometimes very scarce and only in for a couple of weeks, often not displayed. Ino-san has hundreds of special (all classic) preparations that can be made for someone who likes them, and when fish of a certain size are available, and when a certain seasonal mushroom is also available, etc. So the ideal situation is to go regularly and often so that your preferences can be learned. A vast proportion of Ino Sushi's business is with such regulars. Most of the regulars just sit down and never order anything, eating whatever Inoue-san considers the best choice given the regular's personal taste, the fish available, seasonal factors, all in. But some people order just what they want: one regular (non-asian) has been coming in weekly for over twenty-five years and having the identical set of sushi every week, never anything new or different. If you live close enough, Ino Sushi is the one sushi bar in San Francisco where you should cultivate the status of a regular. Don't expect a single visit to dazzle you with special treats perfectly calibrated to your taste. Go often and it will get better and better, eventually better than anything you've ever tasted. If you are visiting Ino Sushi without time to become a regular, the best approach is to tell Inoue-san quietly that you are visiting, that you like everything, and that you'd like to have his best choice of sushi (or of sashimi and sushi, if you like). You need not worry about being cheated. Don't wimp out and order one of the "sets" from the printed menu--that merely guarantees that you'll get the simplest sushi (one maguro, one ebi, one ika, ...). You really need to ask Inoue-san for his choice, and he'll be very glad to serve you his best. If you are new and you ask for Inoue-san's choice, he may ask you to estimate how many orders of sushi per person--this is just to get an idea of how to pace you. It's normal to eat up to eight or ten orders per person (each order is two pieces, so fifteen to twenty pieces), but you can order any amount, and you can add more. If you see a regular getting something that looks good, you can ask for that too. One thing that Inoue-san often does is to serve couples by giving them one order together (two pieces) of most fish, and two orders (four pieces) only of things certain to be appreciated, like a special toro. This allows a couple to try more things by splitting single orders (and if something is really good, you can always ask for a repeat order immediately). If you want to do that, best to mention it. You can eat more pieces of sushi at Ino, because Inoue-san puts a relatively small amount of rice with each topping of fish (just right), not the huge molded blocks of "fast-food sushi" places. Realize that if Ino-san does not know you, and if you begin by saying that you don't like several common sushi items, e.g. "no uni, it's too slimy, and no ankimo, I hate it", you have to expect that Ino-san will then pull his punches and serve you what he thinks you will appreciate without much risk--so you won't get the best. In fact, it's a mistake to refuse anything at Ino Sushi. None of the fish is old; if it's not great, Inoue-san is not serving it. Uni is usually borderline much of the time at most sushi bars, worldwide, but in years of eating at Ino I've yet to EVER get uni that wasn't sublimely fresh. It comes from different places (Boston, Japan, Vancouver, Santa Barbara) but it is always perfectly fresh. This is the place to try uni if you think you don't like it. Inoue-san makes in-house things which are often mediocre at other bars because they are bought in. Take ankimo; most sushi bars have little sticks of ground-up "processed liver food" made commercially and cooked in molds, and most people don't like them, but Ino-san buys raw lobes of monkfish liver and cooks them himself by a unique process--a glorious marine liver flavor, better than any foie gras, not to be found anywhere else and not to be missed. Or ikura, usually bought in heavily-salted; Ino-san makes his own ikura starting with fresh salmon eggs and seasoning/marinating it himself. (So try "salmon three ways"--order ikura, fresh salmon, and grilled salmon-skin handroll.) Even the humble cooked shrimp, ebi, is amazing at Ino, juicy and full of flavor. (And the raw ama ebi gets the heads wonderfully grilled, much better than frying them.) In hundreds of visits, thousands of orders of sushi at Ino Sushi, I've never gotten a single thing which wasn't excellent and perfectly fresh. This is not true anywhere else in San Francisco. You can be sure that you won't ever get any sushi which isn't delicious. (Notably, look inside the front door and you'll see the Health Dept.'s "100" perfect rating displayed; you don't see many of those.) Ino Sushi is the one place where I have had the experience many times of sitting down and having my feet hit the bag in front of my neighbor's chair--a bag of knives, since the other customer really is a chef either on the way to or coming from working at another restaurant. I've sat next to chefs from many first-rank bay area restaurants, learning and appreciating. Completely false. Takara isn't bad, but it isn't in even vaguely the same league as Ino Sushi. I've eaten there several times (while Ino is closed for Inoue-san's periodic holidays around the world), and never thought it at all comparable. Probably, anyone who thinks that Takara is "as good or better" had better eat over there, and save Ino Sushi for those of us who can tell the difference and can recognize true excellence.

Tres Agaves is absolutely terrible. The line about "go for the drinks but skip the food" is on target. (Even then, they couldn't come up with a wine list for us so the bar manager showed us his computer order form, but the first three wines I picked out were unavailable. He suggested his favorite wine, which was plonk. You'd better like the margaritas.) The tortillas were embarassingly bad, the rice had a rotten flavor, the beans were undistinguished--and just a few blocks away in the Mission you can get great house-made tortillas and great rice/beans in lots of small places. The much-touted carnitas had no long-cooked-pork flavor, just a gimmicky crispy outside. One waiter told us that he didn't like the food, either. But a manager, when we complained, told us that the place was geared to churning out the margaritas and that it was pointless to focus on the food. Service was horrid. The hostess wanted to seat everyone at the worst tables, there was no organization about which waiters and bussers had which tables, so it was endless waving for attention. Tres Agaves is no place to go to eat.

The important fact that mixer taps are very recent in the UK seems to have been overlooked, but it explains much of the non-rinsing. Most of the installed plumbing in the UK has a hot tap and a cold tap, and the only way to mix an intermediate temperature is in a closed sink or basin. The hot water is these days kept very hot to avoid Legionnaires Disease, and in winter the cold is very cold; neither is tolerable for running-water rinsing. Mixer taps like those known elsewhere in the civilized world have only been permitted in the last few years. Many Brits still believe that they are "dodgy", and some believe that they are actually still illegal and that luxury hotels are evading the law. This same inability to have mixed hot and cold water accounts for the British having mostly baths (separate hot and cold taps mixed in the tub) rather than showers, and for the fact that bidets are nearly unknown in the UK. My wife and I refurbished an extremely posh Victorian mansion flat in central London over the last five years, including replacing all the basic systems such as plumbing. Everything was top-quality, since the flat probably wouldn't be refurbished again in our lifetimes. Our plumbers, stylish and expensive though they were, didn't believe in mixer taps; they explained that up until very recently mixer taps were quite properly forbidden lest some impurity in the hot water sneak back to corrupt the mains water supply. Now such taps were recently legal, but still not a good idea and they preferred not to fit them--no one really needed them, anyway. We had to really argue to get mixer taps in the kitchen and bathrooms. Historically, the mains water supplies in the UK have had very weak pressure compared to the US (old and weak pipes), so the fear that some pressurized hot water system might force contaminated water into the mains was not entirely fantasy (mains water pressure can become negative when the fire brigade opens a nearby hydrant). The new regulations, of course, require check valves to prevent any backflow, but the whole idea of mixer valves is new-fangled. Most British houses are still equipped with a water tank on the loft, which is slowly filled by the weak mains pressure. All water for the house passes through this (normally open) tank, with plenty of opportunity for insects and animals to pollute the water. Since a typical British shower is fed from the tank which is only a foot or so over the head of the bather, the pressure is very low. If you want to fill a bathtub, it's important to start with the cold water, and then fill up with hot water. If you do it the other way around, you'll empty the hot water tank, which then fills up from the water tank on the loft. When you're done with the hot water, there's no more cold water left in the tank. Further background, from "Old-Fashioned Faucets: Unique British Standard By JAMES R. HAGERTY, The Wall Street Journal Online, Oct. 31, 2002: "During a wartime visit to Moscow in 1942, Winston S. Churchill discovered a marvel of modern technology: hot and cold water flowing from the same faucet. "The plumbing in the villa where he stayed as a guest of Stalin was unlike the primitive British standard of separate taps for hot and cold. Rather than having to fill up the sink to achieve the right blend, the British leader could wash his hands under gushing water "mingled to exactly the temperature one desired," as he put it in his memoirs. From then on, he resolved to use this method whenever possible. "His countrymen have been slow to take up the single-spigot cause. Most bathroom sinks in Britain still have separate hot and cold taps today, 60 years after Mr. Churchill's conversion and decades after nearly all dual taps were scrapped in the U.S. and most vanished from continental Europe. For reasons of thrift, regulations and a stubborn attachment to tradition, the British have resisted the tide of plumbing history. Even when they renovate old homes, many choose two-tap systems, and builders often install them in new, low-end housing. Separate taps account for an estimated 40% of all bathroom-faucet sales in the U.K." Old-Fashioned Faucets: Unique British Standard (Wall Street Journal)

Any restaurant that fails to make maximum use of OpenTable is making a big mistake. A diner uses them to see "which restaurants have bookings available for tonight?" or "... on Friday around 8:00?" Restricted by neighborhood or area. Or, a diner uses them to see "when is the next available booking for the specific restaurant I want to go to?" After you see how well those searches work, you never again start looking up and calling restaurant after restaurant only to be disappointed at each; you never again call the specific restaurant and beg for a table. You go straight to OpenTable. You do the search, choose, get the confirmation, click on "map", print the map and/or driving directions, and you're done in a minute or less. Unlike the original setup, now they verify the booking immediately with the restaurant's reservation book, and they confirm immediately and then again by email. No screw-ups. The other night, I found out at 4:30 PM that I needed to entertain guests in San Francisco at 6:00 PM the same night. Rather than feeling discouraged, OpenTable immediately revealed which restaurants had tables an hour and a half later--and there were LOTS of good ones, surprisingly. By 4:31 PM, it was sorted.

Fortunately, there is one major exception to this generalization: Ino Sushi. Ino Sushi is basically on the level of Kiss or (the new smaller) Kabuto which were both mentioned above, and like them is the reflection of the fanatic integrity of its master chef and owner. At Ino Sushi the chef is Noboru Inoue, who has been in business nearby for twenty-five years. Recently the building housing his sushi bar was demolished to build a bigger building, so he moved into Japan Center proper--now at 22 Peace Plaza #510, SF 94115, on the second floor very close to the Radisson Miyako hotel. Like Kiss and the new Kabuto, Ino is very small--9 seats at the bar and a maximum of 10 seats at tables. It is exceptionally quiet and peaceful, with an amazing blonde-wood sushi bar, calligraphy on the walls, Japanese art, all in exquisite taste. Inoue-san does all the preparation personally, and his wife serves. Like Kabuto, Ino buys the most expensive cuts of seasonally-perfect fish, and any fish offered will be exceptionally good (unlike the cheaper spots, where most of the fish isn't fit to be sold as sushi). Ino-san has a large choice in the sushi bar, and many items "below the counter". Literally not to be missed is his ankimo (monkfish liver), which he buys and prepares himself--it is completely different from ankimo anywhere else, and is so exceptionally rich that it makes wonderful sushi. Many fish are available in "local" and "Japanese" variants (caught on the two sides of the Pacific) for comparison. But everything is fabulously fresh and good. Inoue-san has a large supply of sakes (some not normally sold in the US), and is very helpful in choosing one to suit the drinker. Kiss is similar in some ways (small, chef of great integrity, quality) but it is really not a sushi bar--it specializes in full Japanese dinners with a single sushi course, so it doesn't have the range of fish on any one night. Kabuto is also similar (almost as small in its new location, and Kojima-san is certainly a chef of the highest integrity, and the selection is much larger every night) but Kabuto still serves non-sushi dishes (Aya is in the kitchen now), and the new location is so crowded and bright and noisy that it has lost most of the charm of the original location across the street--though none of the quality has been lost. Ino Sushi, by contrast, serves only what a proper sushi bar serves--grilled sardines, steamed egg custard, miso soup, yes, but apart from a few things like that it is sushi and sashimi only, and only the classical items and rolls. This focus makes it possible to have a large selection. And the physical surroundings are unparalleled--quiet, tranquil, visually peaceful, unhurried. Many Japanese family and business clients. Very few loud customers asking for "inside-out mayonnaise football roll" or such nonsense. Ino, Kabuto, and Kiss are all in the same price range, about $50-60 per person for sushi and ordinary beverages, plus generous tip. At all three, a regular customer will receive a personalized reception, but everyone is treated exceptionally well. These are the three places to check out in San Francisco. For me, the elegance of Ino Sushi puts it a bit in front.

Chef Karlinsky is not telling the full story about the troubles that led to the closing of her Meetinghouse restaurant in San Francisco. I personally ate there three times at dinner. The first time was fine, although the room was crowded with excess staff and Karlinsky herself among all the tables. On the second visit, the kitchen delivered the wrong dishes--not what we'd ordered. Rather than another long wait, we ate them and Karlinsky took one entree off the check. On the third visit, a steak was delivered vastly overcooked and the server was unhelpful. Karlinsky took both entrees off our check, we paid for wine and appetizers and left--and never went back. And we were not the only people in the dining room with problems. The bulk of her satisfied business seemed to be retirees who strolled over for brunch. At night she had lots of customers, but a very confused operation with too many staff and lots of screw-ups. And frankly, there are too many other places in San Francisco with food equally good and with better management.