komatsu: omakase dinner

komatsu: omakase dinner
Originally uploaded by bluepupae.

if you like tempura, this is the place to go as they perfectly batter and fry a variety of seafood, veggies and fruit, many of which you will be hard pressed to find elsewhere. i like tempura, but i couldn't imagine eating an all-tempura meal. luckily, i went with a group. many of us ordered the omakase, including me, but my boyfriend, uncertain that it would be all fish & veggies, ordered (with my help..ok, so i picked things out for him) from the two page a la carte menu.

here is what was included in the omakase, which was almost all tempura:
miso soup: rich brown, earthy soup, salty with strong mushroom flavors and hints of rice vinegar

shrimp (good, typical), squid (nice texture, not too chewy), white fish (very strong, good fish flavor), and sea eel (subtle fish flavor)

clam (at least that's what i think she said, but it was more oyster-like to me), stuffed mushroom (my favorite, the mushroom was smoky and stuffed with shrimp chunks that seemed to be battered with some egg), onion (sweet, soft)

salted plum (the most intense of the ingredients, the plum was like a salty, sour and very lightly sweet compote), asparagus, sweet potato (another standout, with a crispy chip-like skin, soft and just the right amount of sweetness inside)

along with the tempura, you get a dish of freshly minced daikon and some tempura sauce, a trio of salts that include plain, lemon which had sesame bits and green tea. i couldn't really make out the lemon, but the green tea was interesting.

i'm glad we were able to share some a la carte plates because i was starting to get tempura'd out by the end. here is what we had off the menu:

soft shell crab: lightly battered, standard, good

asparagus sesame sauce: fresh asparagus in a salty, miso flavored black sesame seed sauce

fried eggplant mushroom: what came to the table was different than what i imagined. japanese eggplant & shimeji (small, brown, slippery mushrooms that will make you work to pick them up with your chopsticks) cooked in a broth with seaweed, topped with scallions. it tasted like the ocean.

we ended with some green tea & lychee ice creams. the lychee was great. the green tea was good and typical.

even though i ate a lot of fried food, none of it was greasy. i found the combination of flavors in some of the a la carte items to be more interesting than the tempura, although they could have pulled back a little on the salt. the way the tempura is prepared really makes it more of an accent to the natural flavors of the ingredients, which are unseasoned. maybe i had high expectations based on past reviews, considering cost ($44 chef's menu), and that it was suppose to be the best the chef has to offer, but i wasn't blown away by the omakase as i had hoped.

service was ok. we had a large group that was divided into three private rooms, so at times was slow, and the waitresses do not speak english that well.