Café Japonaise

Ever want your Japanese food a little different?

Dining Out by Robert Nadeau

Café Japonaise (617) 738-7200 1034 Comm Ave, Allston Open Tues-Thurs and Sun, 5 p.m.-midnight; Fri and Sat, 5 p.m.-2 a.m. Beer and wine AE, MC, Visa Sidewalk-level access to main floor, lift to mezzanine

I don't know why these folks opened a Japanese restaurant with a French name. I don't know why they play Aretha Franklin's greatest hits when they open at 5 p.m., followed by a tape of swing hits. I don't know why they kept so much of the Victorian decoration from the previous restaurant, and then installed even more. Maybe there was a recent Japanese cultural epoch when soulful and funky French Victoriana was considered cool. Or maybe the owners just like all these things and really don't care whether I think they go together or not. When it comes to the food -- and here I am somewhat more certain -- they are doing things differently than other Japanese restaurants. Again, I'm not sure my opinion matters to them as much as theirs does. But for the record, I think they're pretty much okay on the food part.

The menu doesn't look that odd. There are a lot of pages, most of them about sushi, and the names of the fish and shellfish aren't any different than at any other sushi bar. But when I order my usual sushi deluxe ($16.50), it's not what I expect. Whereas most of their competition loads up a plate like this, Café Japonaise sticks with only nine things. Then again, the slices of fish on the finger-shaped nigiri sushi hang over the rice on both ends -- they're cutting the fish twice as long. If you like broiled eel as much as I do, and you see that double-length strip on an assorted platter . . . well, it kind of gets you where your appetite really lives.

Another unusual sight is a turret of sea-urchin roe, a sushi typically reserved for more-expensive plates. Another turret is flying-fish roe, usually a crunchy garnish on rolled sushi. The other sushi are familiar: a white fish, salmon, two grades of raw tuna, tilefish, and something like sea trout. But the large size makes sushi foreign all over again. Either you can taste a lot more fish and a lot less rice, or you can cut off the ends and eat some sashimi and some sushi.

California roll ($3) is sold with and without flying-fish roe, a nicety I've not seen elsewhere. Without, it's still a weird inside-out seaweed roll around crab, cucumber, and avocado, but the flavor of a few sesame seeds is prominent. Sesame also surprises in an appetizer I've not seen elsewhere, gomaae ($4). This is spinach and broccoli, slightly steamed to hold the color and flavor, resting on a sauce of ground black sesame seeds. It looks like miso, but it isn't salty. It looks like chocolate, but it isn't sweet.

With dinners, you get a covered lacquer bowl of white miso soup, and sometimes an iceberg salad; the spoiled dressing on ours was the one bad note of two visits to Café Japonaise. What is again surprising is how entrées are dressed up like American dinner plates. Even, I would say, piled on a little bit, as you see at the trendy bistros. For example, teriyaki chicken ($13.50) sounds simple enough, but the platter has, besides a sliced chicken breast and sauce, a salad of field greens; a vegetable assortment of cooked eggplant, yellow bell pepper, wagon-wheel pasta, and sugar-snap peas; two fried potato wedges; two broccoli florets; and a mound of white rice.

Beef curry ($9.50) brings, first of all, a metal soup spoon presented ceremoniously wound into a paper napkin. The stew is arranged neatly around a double-size mound of white rice topped with caramelized onion. There is a lot of sauce and three neatly arranged chunks of beef among five perfect broccoli florets and an equal number of stewed carrots. This isn't haute cuisine; in fact, the whole gorgeous thing is designed to focus the mind correctly on the reddish gravy. In this case it is quite like beef stew, flavored with a curry powder strong on the fenugreek (like Singapore curry powder) but devoid of yellow turmeric. It's like the greatest blue-plate special in Heaven's gleaming diner.

One night when I was not entirely well, I wanted what some Japanese eat when they want to feed a cold -- tempura udon. I settled for a more elaborate version, nabe-yaki udon ($14.50), which had a couple of fried shrimp melting into a bowl of soup containing very fat white noodles, a whole shiitake mushroom, a slowly poaching egg, carrots, napa cabbage, two kinds of fish sausage, and some white-meat chicken. This wasn't just feeding the cold, it was wining and dining the cold, then showing it around Quincy Market.

Many dinners bring mild, hot green tea. However, Café Japonaise also has several brands of Japanese beer and six brands of cold sake. I suspect those karaoke machines in the upstairs room get a workout on the weekend nights. Dessert is limited to green-tea and red-bean ice creams.

Service on our early-evening visits was generally good. When there weren't a lot of customers or servers, our waiter was a sushi chef, and he bowed and repeated orders carefully. The space, which used to be a hip bakery-café, is very odd and getting odder. The front room is a open duplex space, with ceiling fans and elaborate lights. Stairs lead up to the second floor, which now has a large aquarium as a dividing wall, so one sees fish swimming above the heads of the downstairs staff. The downstairs has some wall art and some old American oak furniture with many curlicues. At the entrance is a poster of whole shrimp arranged in careful rows, which makes them look like space aliens in suspended animation for interstellar flight.

Well, Japanese restaurants in Boston were getting a little humdrum and familiar. Here's one with really excellent and novel food, and it keeps you thinking besides.

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I got my copy of Dining Out: Secrets from America's Leading Critics, Chefs, and Restaurateurs (John Wiley & Sons), by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, the way I get the meals for this column: I paid retail. I'm pretty sure the bookstore staff didn't recognize me, or they would have tried to steer me away from the book. Regrettably, most of Dining Out is about critics (rather than about restaurants or dining out). Some of the critics quoted are honest and talented (e.g., Jonathan Gold), but they don't come off as any wiser than those I would consider shills or phonies (e.g., Esquire's John Mariani). This suggests not only that the authors themselves lack a critical sensibility, but also that they asked the wrong questions. There is a lot of noodling around -- despite devoting eight pages to the question of rating with stars, they never notice the crucial fraudulence of such systems, which is that every restaurant gets the same two or two and a half stars. The book is extensive, expensive ($29.95), lavishly designed and illustrated, and wrong about everything -- except, probably, that the quotes are what the interviewees actually said.

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

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