After 24 hours of gorging at the family trough, filling plate after plate with gooey cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes blanketed in melted marshmallow, buttery biscuits piled high with butterball turkey, and pie made from the pumpkins that weren't pretty enough to grace the front porch on Halloween, I've had enough. By Friday, all I can taste is sage; if you prick me, only bright red cranberry sauce oozes out. At one point, I think I drank the gravy.
I have a tradition for the day after Thanksgiving. The surest antidote to this festival of American gluttony is a dose of the most restrained international cuisine available. That's why, late on Black Friday, I'm walking into Satsuki Japanese Restaurant. It's like a splash of water to wake me from a particularly buttery nightmare, an island of calm in the middle of a weekend that is often anything but.
The restaurant's interior is nothing special, as Japanese places go, but the tables are widely spaced, the kitschy knickknacks are kept to a minimum and the volume on the TV above the sushi bar is kept low so we don't have to listen to Ice Cube use his comedic talents in The Friday After Next. When a child starts screaming at a nearby table, the father quickly picks her up and carries her outside until she quiets down. Considering recent hours I've spent with my extended family, Satsuki qualifies as a Zen paradise.
We toss back dainty thimbles of warm sake and start in on bowls of steaming miso soup ($2.50). As I drag my spoon through the mild dashi broth, a cloud of white miso billows up from the bottom, spreading smoke and salt throughout the soup. It's good, and small enough to just barely tantalize my appetite.
Likewise, modest saucers of marinated squid ($4.75) and wakame seaweed ($4.50) serve merely to awaken our taste-buds from their Thanksgiving torpor. Both are dressed with just a bare touch of sesame oil, the squid sweet and meaty, and the wakame, well the wakame has that alien green crunch that separates seaweed from every other salad green. I love it.
We do drop briefly into heavier fare with the arrival of veggie tempura ($5.95) and gyoza ($5.50). Slices of yam, potato and zucchini are coated in golden flaky batter, with a sweet soy dipping sauce that acts as necessary seasoning for the bland vegetables. Satsuki's dumplings are almost perfect, the wonton wrappers brown and bubbled from a quick sauté so that every bite has a bit of crisp and a bit of soft skin to accompany the ginger- and pepper-spiced pork filling.
Another soup course — this time seafood udon ($11.95) — fills the air above the table with steam and reminds us to down more shots of warm sake. A ceramic crock is filled with rich fish stock sweetened by a dose of mirin and a nest of thick, soft noodles.
It's so hot, we pull out the noodles with our chopsticks and set them aside to cool as we slurp spoonfuls of broth. Each strand of wheat pasta has absorbed the flavorful soup and by the time we hit the bottom of the bowl we are fighting over the final few tendrils.
When I look around, all of the nearby tables are filled with Japanese families, enjoying the same food we've loved during the first half of our meal. But there's no sushi on those tables, and after I start sampling the platters of sashimi ($16.95) and sushi ($18.95) placed on our table, I can see why.
It's not bad by any stretch, but it fails to live up to the promise of Satsuki's cooked dishes. Thin slices of white, orange and red fish are artfully piled across one platter, each one fresh and pristine. This sashimi tastes, well, like nothing, just a bit of brine to activate the tongue. When I eat Satsuki's molded sushi, just the subtle seasoning in the rice overpowers the insipid fish. Sure, it's fresh, but the tuna has none of the fat that gives it flavor. The salmon is the same, and the hamachi is even worse.
A tuna roll that accompanies the sushi platter is so gummy that it feels like it was assembled earlier in the day and set aside for this moment. I may have been looking for some subtlety to balance my Thanksgiving feast of the day before, but this fish is more than subtle. It's flavorless.
Other rolls are much better, perhaps because there is a lot more going on to beef up the flavor profile. The "captain crunch makimono" ($5.25) is fortified by enough tempura chunks to make up for the bland tuna, while futomaki ($5.95) is packed with so much fish, flavored mayo and roe it's like eating a pizza with everything.
Sushi is fundamental to my psychological and culinary post-Thanksgiving cleansing ritual, so it's a little disappointing to be faced with bland fish. By this point, though, I have talked dining companion Neal into regaling us with stories of living in an office building in Tokyo and brewing beer for the Japanese mafia — apparently it wasn't very good, but what do you expect from a makeshift brewery hidden in a storage room? After that, he waxes poetic about the noodle shops in Japan.
He's preaching to the choir, so we order another round of Satsuki's stellar udon and end the meal on a high point. Hopefully the noodles will fill me up, so I won't be tempted to pile some dark meat and cranberry sauce on a roll when I get home. Who am I kidding, though; even full, I'll be raiding the fridge.
Brian Ries is a former restaurant general manager with an advanced diploma from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He can be reached at brian.ries@weeklyplanet.com. Planet food critics dine anonymously, and the paper pays for the meals. Restaurants chosen for review are not related to advertising.
This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2005.