Ginza

Could New England's best sushi just have landed in Brookline? The Ginza Surprise will tell.

1002 Beacon Street, Brookline; 566-9688
Open Mon - Thurs, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m.;
Fri and Sat, 11:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 10:30 p.m.;
and Sun, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m.
AE, DC, MC, Visa
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access

By Robert Nadeau

I always thought that the people who called Ginza, in Chinatown, the best sushi restaurant in Boston were late-night revelers prone to exaggeration. On an exploratory lunch there, I found the sushi good but nothing special, and Japanese food had better be pretty special when I am surrounded by the savory temptations of Chinatown.

But the owners brought the matter to my attention again recently by opening a new Ginza near Audubon Circle, just inside Brookline -- and a lot closer to where I live. This Ginza lays very serious claim to being the best sushi restaurant in Boston and surrounding towns, which is tantamount to the New England championship. Not only are the sushi and sashimi of astonishing freshness and notable creativity, but this Ginza also breaks ground by pouring more than 20 brands of sake, and still does a very good job with Japanese dishes for the sushi non-fiends among us. This is an all-around top-class Japanese restaurant, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer suburb.

Imagine my delight, on a cold recent evening, to walk into Ginza and be offered not only the traditional hot towel but a choice of 15 brands of hot sake. I agree that sake is something of an acquired taste, since this powerful rice wine has little fruit aroma to mask the bare, medicinal smell of alcohol. But then you get something like the top-of-the-line Onikoroshi ($5 for three ounces, $8.50 for a half-carafe, $16.50 for a full carafe), which still looks clear and smells like shellac, but has been aged and selected into a flavor as fruity and complex as oloroso sherry -- and that's when it's hot. My recommendation is to come in with a larger party and try several of the sakes side by side to compare the contrasting styles.

My usual measure for a sushi restaurant is a big platter like the nigiri deluxe ($17). This isn't necessarily the best way to eat sushi; I like the romance -- something like that of a New Orleans oyster bar -- of sitting at the sushi bar and discussing a series of small orders with the chef. But the assorted platter is the quickest survey of the freshness of the difficult items, the subtlety of the cooked morsels like eel and mackerel, the quality of the sushi rice, the tightness and creativity of the rolled items (maki), the rhythm of the selection, and the couple of specialties a top chef will use to show off.

But Ginza's menu really brings it to me with the "Ginza Surprise" ($23.50). This is the anthology every reviewer, and every sushi lover walking into a new sushi bar for the first time, has been waiting for: a chef's selection of the wildest sushi and sashimi out there. At Ginza, we were surprised by a half lobster shell stuffed with rice and heaped with cooked lobster meat and crunchy shreds of yellow bean-curd skin. In a martini glass was a leaf of the wildly flavored herb shiso, and diced morsels of several cooked fish in a sauce of sea-urchin roe. Maki included salmon wrapped around ginger; cucumber, pickle, and phony crab bound up like shaving brushes in seaweed wrappers; and diagonally cut cylinders of tuna. The platter also included beautifully cut sashimi of cooked octopus, raw dark tuna, raw sea trout sliced like ribbons and sprinkled with crunchy flying-fish eggs, and even a few of the familiar nigiri fingers.

Even without the Ginza Surprise, the nigiri deluxe platter would establish Ginza as a major sushi bar. It's a wooden boat with quite a crew: pink and dark tuna, tilefish with some hot horseradish, a shrimp stuffed with rice and standing up, stacked turrets of tuna maki and flying-fish eggs, a lemon cut into a snail, boiled eel, and such.

Beyond sushi, Ginza has 31 appetizers and several soups on the menu. Some of these snacks are as familiar as shumai ($4.95), the little fried barrel dumplings, with a hot mustard dip. Or the gyoza ($4.95), like slimmed-down Peking ravioli with an airy white chicken-egg stuffing and a dip of soy, sesame, and hot vinegar. Some are less familiar snacks, like edamame, green soybeans in the shell ($3.75), which taste like concentrated lima beans and are great fun to eat.

For those who want their food fully cooked, the obvious choice is tempura, deep-fried delights available in a variety of combinations for $9.95 to $16.95. We had the largest, but you can safely specialize since all the components were delightful. Shrimp are the mainstay of tempura, but scallops and fish fillets also work well on this platter, and the vegetables are terrific and not too greasy. Among the generous teriyaki dinners, we did chicken ($12.25) and beef ($13.25); both were in a sauce as savory as anything in a Chinese restaurant.

Desserts are not a forte of Japanese restaurants, but Ginza has tried to do something unusual. Fried ice cream ($4.25) is made from layers of ginger and green-tea ice cream -- and the fried shell is tempura batter! A fresh-fruit platter ($5.50) rose above the average with slices of ripe green melon, giant grapes, and some fancy carving. But an unripe pineapple brought it back toward earth.

Service -- probably because the sushi is cut to order -- slows as the room fills, and dishes arrive as they are prepared. Our servers were all fully bilingual and helpful with recommendations. The room, which was previously a Turkish restaurant, has been redone with lots of blond wood, a little rice paper, a fine piece of framed antique calligraphy, and some well-blended Western décor. One feature that ought to be rethought is the many small, high-intensity lights that always seem to be pointed into one's eyes. I've seen these lights used well in art galleries, so they could be aimed at wall art rather than at me.

Brookline has a long string of good sushi bars along Harvard Street, but this one comes in like royalty and demands respect. It will be interesting to see the response. Will the other Japanese restaurants move toward more innovative maki, or back toward sukiyaki and familiar dinners? Will there be a sake craze? Will Ginza be the capstone of the sushi trend, or a trendsetter to be followed?