Café Hip Fish

By Paul Reidinger

IF WE ACCEPT that sushi is indeed the hippest of foods, and Café Abir the hippest of cafés, then we are probably prepared to accept the huge coffee roaster at the entrance to Tsunami Sushi and Sake Bar, Café Abir owners Musa and Khalen Dajani's new foray into raw-fish hipness. The iron monster certainly sends an odd visual cue – is it an optical illusion, a joke, a remnant of some lost enterprise? – but we were told the roasters-that-be at Café Abir actually use the apparatus (presumably for its intended purpose) in the early mornings.

Their timing ensures, among other things, they will not be disturbing the hip, most of whom are doubtless still asleep after a late night out – say, eating sushi, possibly at Tsunami, although Tsunami doesn't stay open particularly late. (The restaurant stops serving food at 11 p.m., while the sake bar stays open until 2 a.m. for diehards.) In fact, the place even has a happy hour, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. daily (it is interesting how often alcohol-related happy hours tend to run considerably longer than 60 minutes), in which cocktails, draft beers, and sangria can be had for $2.25 a pop and hand rolls are a third off ($3 each, marked down from $4.50). This is the sort of deal that would make Florida pensioners very happy, if Florida pensioners ate sushi, which I suspect few do.

Still, the hipness of the place is unmistakable: rhythmic, though muted, techno music, rosewood shelving installed at a slant behind the bar, moody reddish lighting, skullcaps on the chefs. The feel is vaguely retro and mod; the space would serve nicely as the setting for a scene from You Only Live Twice, with Sean Connery as James Bond, 007. Then, of course, there's the clientele.

"We're the oldest people here!" my companion hissed to me on our first visit. Apparently he felt we – people old enough to know there is no other Bond but Connery's – were at risk of expulsion. But no. Service staff are attentive and prompt and understand the value of those little grace notes once known as manners: transactions with staff tend to be well lubricated with plenty of "thank you's and "you're welcome's. At no time was any reference made to our advanced age, our lack of skullcaps and ponytails, or our pleated khakis.

The connection between Japanese cuisine and coolness isn't surprising. The spectrum of raw fish dishes we refer to in shorthand as sushi, in particular, reflects a spare stylishness that manages to seem both ancient and utterly modern: it has always been what it is, and we never tire of it. As it happens, the dot-commers – hipsters at least in their own minds – also fastened upon sushi, perhaps because its more exotic examples can be showily expensive. But they are mostly gone, and most of Tsunami's offerings are not too pricey.

The sushi chef, Eliott Harris, is American by birth, and that fact is to some degree reflected in the food. While there are a good many traditional dishes – a fine wakame salad ($4), dressed with ponzu and festooned with shreds of daikon; edamame ($3); miso soup ($2) – Harris's heart seems to find its best expression in big rolls layered with sometimes unorthodox ingredients.

We particularly liked the papa-san ($13), in part because of its conventional California core (of spicy crab and avocado) but more for its remarkable superstructure: thin rounds of jalapeño pepper, caramelized with a blowtorch – jalapeño brûlée? – and artfully piped with spicy aioli.

Aioli is, of course, garlic mayonnaise (ail means garlic in – shhh! – French) and serves as a kind of Provençal butter. But if it isn't exactly indigenous to Japanese cuisine, Harris makes it seem otherwise. It turns up hither and yon: atop the magic mushrooms ($7), salmon and enoki wrapped in rice and nori and scattered with tobiko; atop the signature tsunami roll ($12), tuna and binko with flash-fried asparagus; and, of course, atop the mama-san ($12), which quite resembled the papa-san except for replacement of the spicy crab by tempura shrimp. Shades of spider roll there, and in fact the actual spider roll ($9), with soft-shell crab claws protruding as if from some gruesome scene of aquatic murder, made a nice and not too expensive accompaniment.