Ozeki Teriyaki / Sushi

The following is a review from one of my readers. My review of Ozeki Teriyaki is available here.

Ozeki Teriyaki / Sushi is located at 14701 E 14th St. We went there on an
impulse at about 7 pm tonight (11/13/07). The decor is plebeian, but never mind that.
The cheery waitress waved us to a table, and at length we got the house
salad: mostly iceberg lettuce, with a sweet-and-sour creamy dressing which
had a faint savor of peanuts. That was accompanied by a very satisfactory
(and plain) miso soup, which made me resolve to make it at home every day.
It’s all probiotic and stuff.
The menu is humongous, because they use the same one for lunch specials,
appetizers, dinners and a la carte sushi. My husband had chicken katsu – and
their tonkatsu sauce tasted better than Tsuru Sushi’s, for some reason. The
chicken was sliced after frying, and was piled attractively on a big chard
leaf. The meat was fresh and cooked in oil that had not been over-used, so
he was happy.
I had trouble deciding, but eventually settled on “Chirashi A,” which
differs from “Chirashi B” only because it’s a smaller dish. I asked the
waitress to describe it. “Sushi rice,” she explained, “and sushi,” gesturing
that the rice lay under the sushi. That seemed a little carb-heavy for me,
but I said OK.
What she brought me was a great big bowl of rice covered with what must have
been half a pound of *sashimi* – raw fish! Mind you, it was excellent fish,
cut into slabs about 1/2-inch thick – but there was much more than I wanted
to eat. Some of it was gorgeous, like the “super white tuna” (as the
waitress called it), which I would happily eat every day. It is almost as
white as typing paper, and shows little or no muscle structure at all, and
it is sheer savory tenderness. There was also an end of octopus tentacle,
sliced lengthwise – good flavor, but very tough. I didn’t eat it, but it was
something to write home about, definitely. There was also a generous helping
of raw salmon, some raw tuna (the usual cherry-red, muscle-striated kind), a
few pieces of halibut (I think), and some white, tough, fishy-tasting bits
garnished with flying-fish eggs. I love flying-fish eggs; they are such a
pretty shade of orange, sparkle like diamonds, and crunch pleasingly in the
mouth. The plate was garnished with big mounds of pink pickled ginger and
wasabi paste – probably colored with spinach and spiked with horseradish, as
the paste kind tends to be, but there was a little sweetness in it that
helped everything harmonize. Nevertheless, I brought home a lot of sashimi.
We are definitely going back – after all, this adventure only cost us $25
for two people – but next time I’ll order something that isn’t raw. Well,
maybe a little side order of “super white tuna.”
Michaele Maurer