The message is unmistakable: Sushi is sex or, at least, a consuming kiss. The subtext is no less apparent: Café Japon is fusion. For those who are metaphor-impaired, it is spelled out. "Café Japon, cuisine for the senses," blurts a publicity pack insert. "Indulge in the sensual experience of Japanese fusion food and drink, an exquisite blend of traditional and innovative colors, textures and tastes."
But like most overt lunges into the carnal and the fused, things can get a little clumsy.
Example: tofu steak. Is there a more incongruent word pair than one describing a square pad of yellow coagulated soy milk posing as bovine loin? Is there an odder visual than a vegan anti-establishment political statement affecting the mannerism of broiled capitalist exploitation on a plate? It's served in a pan. The steak rests in a thin soy garlic sauce with slices of mushroom and jalapeño tumbled over the surface and floating in the fluid. A dab of pulverized daikon radish rests on one corner. The menu declares it a crispy steak--one thing a steak shouldn't be unless it's plunging into the chicken-fried genre. This steak isn't crispy. It's spongy and soggy. (What else could it be?) And aside from an occasional mushroom-induced delusion, it didn't taste a thing like steak, not even the boiled kind.
Yet that doesn't mean the fusion motif always stumbles. Behold the lettuce wraps: cupped leaves of dewy iceberg with a ground chicken mound teeming with tomato scraps, water chestnuts, carrot, celery, onion and zucchini in a sesame garlic sauce. Lettuce wraps are an ingenious Asian fusion invention targeting mainstream lips with a touch of exotica. Café Japon's wraps are competent, if unexceptional, burnishing the dish's credentials as the quintessential postmodern Asian-fusion culinary cliché.
Here's a rule when you get a whiff of fusion fumbles: authenticate. Unaju is barbecued fresh water eel (basted in sweet soy) resting on a fluffy bed of rice. "Is the barbecued eel any good?" Our server was succinct: "No." We ordered it. It's counterintuitive, but reverse psychology works well in restaurants that are flagrantly fusion. Skip the house specialties. Plumb the dishes on the outskirts of the menu, the ones that seem like placeholders. Probe the servers. Get them to diss a dish. "How's the monkfish liver?" usually flushes them out. Wink, then go for the kill.
The eel is delicious: tender, racy, slightly crisped and not too slathered in unctuous sweet soy. But the eel episode exposes the most critical Café Japon flaw: service.
It's pleasant and earnest enough, but it's clumsy. Café Japon is the Addison transplant of a successful Houston restaurant. It's a modestly modern room with recessed lighting, baffles over the sushi bar and sharp angled walls and ceiling softened by a circular dining space near the front. Lighted nooks hold large wine bottles in the back bar.
We order some wine, an Alder Fels Gewürztraminer, which wine rule books say must be drunk with Asian food because the thread of sweetness is a bulwark against vicious Asian spices. We throw in a Sauvignon Blanc, too, hoping the acid will do the same yeoman's work.
Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. Our server returns. "I'm sorry, but we've sold out of the Gewürztraminer and the Sauvignon Blanc," he says. Christmas drained their stocks. This took 15 minutes to confirm and relay. Our server tries to sell us on a Rabbit Ridge Chardonnay. No, no California bunny chards. A Pinot Grigio? No, not that. Pinot Grigios are a crap shoot. You might get one that's got a little fruit and decent acid, but more often than not you'll get something that tastes like BC Powder. The manager throws this out: Chateau Tour de Mirambeau, a Bordeaux. "It's a very popular wine with the sushi," he says. It is good.
We sip and take in the appetizer menu, which is vast. It dodges from deep-fried to baked, to steamed, to sautéed. You can rein it in with the Kintaro sampler, a porcelain plate with six equal divots of negina (grilled strips of rib eye stuffed with scallion and rolled), crab puffs (fried pastry purses stuffed with crab and cream cheese), gyoza (pan-seared pork dumplings), baked mussels (with mushrooms and spicy mayonnaise) and a chuka salad (a seaweed tangle splashed with soy and sesame oil). All come through in good taste, particularly the negina. This could be a twisted fajita fusion something or other if the strips of juicy beef, bound into a swaddled core stuffed with scallion bits, weren't so tender. Scallion debris lends subtle textural contrast and a nudging sear that helps cut the fat. This is a piece of work you roll around your mouth for a few minutes, testing the flavors, working over the textures, shuffling the sensual information through your head in an attempt to decipher precisely why it compels. It's just beef, after all, sewn with scallion. Yet when simple things, thoughtfully assembled, converge in the mouth, reflection sets in.
But too many of Café Japon's offerings come off as second thoughts. Enter ebi tempura. You expect a Japanese restaurant to execute shrimp tempura with aplomb. It arrives as an indecipherable tangle of carrot, bell pepper, onion, sweet potato and zucchini cloaked in corn starch batter and fried. But sift earnestly through the snarling protrusions, and you'll discover a startling thing: no shrimp. It took the kitchen more than 10 minutes to remedy this absence: a plate of four cool, gummed, soggy things--just another broken cog in the service machine.
Instead of entrées deployed in a relatively tight time window, they were shuttled to our table in intermittent spurts with conspicuous time gaps in between. The last dish, salmon teriyaki, hit close to 20 minutes after the first, shrimp tempura, though the missing shrimp meant this dish was simultaneously the first and last entrée delivered.
That salmon teriyaki was also ripe with flaws. Instead of supple and flaky, the meat was hard, dry and bland. Even the teriyaki sauce was dull.
Still, bright moments break through. Sesame chicken, pan-sautéed breasts speckled with blond seeds lapped in soy garlic sauce, is juicy, tender and well-seasoned. Beef udon, a steaming bowl packed with rippled folds of thinly sliced rib eye, firm noodles, mushrooms and softly crisp spinach, is hearty and soothing.
Sushi holds its own too. Uni (sea urchin gonads) is respectable--if unremarkable--and the California roll rivals many examples in town. Yet there is a streak of innovation: taco (octopus). Typically octopus is thin, creamy strips sliced from a limb, draped over a rice billet. Café Japon twists this with baby taco: swelling burgundy bodies with purplish tentacles resting on seaweed-bound rice. The little spider-like cephalopods look like they could roil at any instant, animating the meal with their boiling deep red. So the red comes full circle: from swelling, lush lips to swollen cephalopod hips.
It's what's in between this fusion that's a real bite. 4933 Belt Line Road, Addison, 469-374-9928. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday, noon-11 p.m. Saturday and noon-10 p.m. Sunday. $$$
Kintaro sampler $9.95
Tofu steak $5.95
Lettuce wrap $7.95
Sushi $3.50-$19.90
Salmon $16.95
Sesame chicken $14.95
Beef udon $8.95
Ebi tempura $12.95
