October 9, 2002

Hamano mío

By Paul Reidinger

THERE WERE EVENINGS , back in the day, when the traffic in front of Hamano Sushi was so heavy that you would have sworn the stars were descending for an Academy Awards party. Double-parked German cars with their emergency lights flashing disgorged glamorous people who swept grandly under the awning into the restaurant itself. You had hopes of sitting at the sushi bar? Forget it. You were lucky if you were able to elbow your way to the host's station, where there was always a mob (the restaurant doesn't take reservations). Hamano had been our neighborhood sushi spot, but it got so out of hand a few years ago that we stopped even trying to get in.

A few weeks ago, on a midweek evening, we walked in and went straight to the host's station without having to bowl anyone out of the way and were offered a table but decided on two choice seats at the bar instead. From that vantage point I could keep an eye on the street, where I saw – in the midst, perhaps, of eating our spicy-tuna roll – a late-model BMW roll up. The driver was twittering into his cell phone, but he did have the presence of mind to switch on his flashers (whose urban meaning has become I claim this space in the name of the king of double-parking!) while a chic blond woman emerged from the passenger door and burst into the restaurant.

Oh, you poor thing, I thought, not altogether unsympathetically. Party's over, tide's gone out, that life is gone with the wind, and nobody told you! And here you are in all your 1999 finery!

Yet I lost track of her in the mob that was unexpectedly gathering about the host's station. For though Hamano may have suffered with the collapse of dot-com – sushi was the dot-com food, and Noe Valley was the preferred urban suburb of all those Silicon Valley rangers – it can still be remarkably busy. If we'd come in 15 minutes later, we would have had an issue. On the other hand, it can also be virtually empty, as we discovered at lunch the following week.

Sushi might have been dot-com food, but its Japanese origin is as fast food, and perhaps that's why having it at the bar is somehow always a memorable experience. We ate lunch at a quiet table in the main dining room (whose low ceiling and line of lights along one wall reminded me of a cruise ship) and found both the A1 ($7.95) – a California roll (of crab and avocado), with tuna, prawn, and salmon sushi and an introductory salad – and the A2 ($8.95) – everything the same except spicy-tuna roll instead of California – to be perfectly competent. But an element of pleasure definitely goes missing when the food just appears as if from nowhere.

No, the sushi bar's the thing, and Hamano's is pretty big, with a sharp L shape, so you can survey the people across from you. And of course it's right at the front window – a plus whether you're interested in the double-parking situation or the preparation of your food.

I like to think that my interests are fairly wide and do include the question of double-parking (to say nothing of a more general voyeurism and exhibitionism), but when seated at a sushi bar I am soon mesmerized by the flashing Global knives and the artful shaping of rolls with those bamboo sheets. And I am particularly mesmerized when the sushi chef speaks perfectly fluent, idiomatic English, as is not always the case.

I might have told the chef, in my own fluent, idiomatic English, that his extraspicy-tuna roll ($6.50) was really extrasalty – too salty. But I didn't. Because we ate it anyway, for one thing, which tends to undermine one's position as a complainant, and because the other dishes kept on coming, and they were in the main quite good. We liked a seared-tuna salad ($9.95) not least for its scattering of wasabi popcorn, candylike in appearance but with a pleasant nip.

And we very much liked spicy scallops ($4.95) in their seaweed roll, the natural sweetness of the scallops making a nice contrast with the salty heat of the sauce. The spider roll ($7) also passed muster with the crustacean connoisseur, who approved of the deep, fresh crispiness of the crab.

I did think the Hamano roll ($6.95) – yellowtail, with bits of carrot, avocado, cucumber, and asparagus – seemed to be drifting toward clutter. The dynamite roll ($11), on the other hand, made up for it with its straightforward and heavy lading of spicy squid and white tuna – a kind of sushi equivalent to those Hungry Man dinners you see advertised on television.