Fugakyu

Sushi boats are nice. A full (and ambitious) Japanese menu is nicer -- and rare.

by Robert Nadeau

Fugakyu (617) 734-1268 or (617) 738-1268 1280 Beacon Street (Coolidge Corner), Brookline Open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. Full bar AE, MC, Visa Sidewalk-level access

While sushi bars proliferate, the rest of the Japanese menu has trailed along slowly. No one has opened a fancy full-dinner Japanese restaurant since the overly ambitious Suntory sank like a cube of tofu into the cloudy miso soup of the Theater District. Without neglecting an extensive sushi menu -- nor a really amusing sushi bar surrounded by an oval moat full of rapidly circling wooden boats -- Fugakyu makes up for lost time in the other traditional categories of Japanese food, such as soups, tempura, noodles, broiled dishes, tableside braises, stir-fries, and pickles. And it supplies such a good variety of tatami rooms and screened-off little dining areas that one hardly realizes how large the restaurant actually is. Although the name sounds a little risqué to American ears, fugakyu apparently means "house of exquisite elegance" in Japanese.

And they have the best version of fried ice cream I've ever tasted.

But, of course, they also have sushi, and very good sushi. I started with an uni (sea urchin, $6) at the bar, and was delighted with the fresh, creamy quality of the sea-urchin roe piled onto two turrets of unobtrusive sushi rice, just accented with a chef's squeeze of lemon at the end. Modern sushi fans may go for something like the "caterpillar maki" ($8), and they will be rewarded with a box full of meandering sections of roasted eel rolled up in rice and ingeniously coated with thin slices of avocado (for the cute caterpillar look). What's neat is how well the flavors of these somewhat oily ingredients combine: this looks like fun and tastes like heaven.

Also just right for the avant-garde is ikura tanzaku ($6.50), which is served in a martini glass (glued down to the lacquer tray with wasabi paste, which looks like green Silly Putty underneath the base of the glass). This is made up of two orange things -- salmon and slices of Japanese yam, topped with salmon eggs and some black caviar. The whole tastes like lox, and the play is in the various textures.

Breaking out just a little from the sushi habit, I also sampled a vast sashimi deluxe ($25), arranged around three drifts of shredded daikon. This is raw fish without the anchoring rice of sushi, and in some ways the challenge to the chef is greater. The art of cutting sashimi is to make each slice a visual triumph, and, of course, these freestanding slices of fish are even more demanding of absolute freshness. (Fugakyu's menu promises seasonal specials on "live-fish sashimi," meaning not the notorious fish served still moving, but fish freshly killed from live tanks.) If you truly love the raw tuna (and not the horseradish-flavored green mustard or the seaweed wrapper) in tuna sushi, then you must graduate to the thicker slices of tuna sashimi served at Fugakyu. And the salmon (interspersed with lemon slices), octopus (cooked for more flavor), tilefish, and sea bass (wrapped into a rose shape with shiso and flying-fish eggs) are almost as remarkable.

For a cooked appetizer, you won't go wrong with kani shumai ($7.50), six delicate dumplings that look like bay scallops wrapped in a thin skin but are actually built of crabmeat and sharpened with a white-hot mustard paste on the side. Although it is listed as an appetizer, tsukemono (Japanese pickles, $4) is most handy as a side nibble with the soup or rice. (Dinners each include a bowl of white miso soup and bowls of sticky Japanese rice.) These pickles were especially distinctive. The hyper-green cucumbers tasted of green shiso, the purple eggplant strips of purple shiso, and the carrot sticks of sesame; the yellow daikon pickles were wonderfully sweet and salty.

Vegetarian tempura ($17) has a great presentation -- a fan of fried vermicelli propped up by a straw boat and in turn supporting fried sticks of asparagus, disks of eggplant and zucchini, playing cards cut from sweet potato, and smaller dominoes of red and green bell pepper. "Fugakyu Garden" ($18) is a stir-fry of mixed vegetables that advertises matsutake mushrooms, the prized autumn mushrooms for which Japanese collectors jet to the Pacific Northwest and comb the pine forests. I have to say that the few pieces of mushroom in this stir-fry are very good, but they lack the distinctive piney-spicy aroma described by Japanese sources, which I have also noted in a closely related species that grows on Cape Cod. Since this isn't the season for any wild mushrooms, I will hazard the guess that Fugakyu is using canned matsutake -- a woodsy product somewhere between a fresh shiitake and a fresh portobello. Good, but not exciting. In a sense, that returns our attention to the rest of the vegetables -- fresh asparagus, green beans, napa cabbage, red and green bell peppers, and quite a lot of pea pods and carrots -- but one could have a more satisfying dish for much less money with, say, dried shiitake mushrooms. Fugakyu does get points for correct undercooking of the familiar vegetables.

The wine list isn't all that well-tuned to Japanese dishes and doesn't list vintage years, but we were happy enough with the '97 Marquis de Goulane Sancerre ($25). The more serious deficiency is in the selection of sake (only three brands), which is remedied somewhat by a good selection of Japanese beers and single-malt Scotch whiskies.

Now about that fried ice cream. It's called "tempura ice cream" ($5), and it is served, somewhat unusually, in a bowl of whipped cream. The breading is thicker than tempura, and cakey, which adds just the right note of sweetness to the green-tea ice cream. Unlike any previous green-tea ice cream I've tasted, this was bright green and had the slightly spinachy flavor of top-quality gyokuro tea. A perfect hint of sweetness devolves from a dab of red-bean paste atop the fried ice cream, itself surmounted by a maraschino cherry -- which in context seemed perfectly Japanese. It all adds up to a delicious ice-cream treat in any language.

Fugakyu servers aim to please, but the kitchen can get stalled when a large group comes in. With the place filling up by 7:30 on a Tuesday night in early January, this is bound to happen on a regular basis. Everyone is accommodating and apologetic, and it's a swell place to hang out, but the pause was noticeable. There is no background music at Fugakyu, though there is a background looped video of achingly beautiful Asian scenery and blossoms.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.