Located on busy Hancock Street south of Quincy Center, Kagawa Sushi Bar and Restaurant offers a huge variety of sushi, maki, tempura, and many other Japanese favorites in a comfortable dining room organized around a sushi bar. Large-sized and decently-priced appetizers can make this spot a good choice for a tasty Japanese lunch. It also has an understated elegance, with original Japanese art on the walls, contemporary serving dishes on the table, and a server in a kimono that can make this a good spot for a dinner to impress.
On a recent afternoon, our party enjoyed a 10-piece sushi platter called the Daisy, vegetable tempura, Tako Yaki (light fried octopus balls), chicken fried rice, and topped it off with tempura-fried green tea ice cream. More on that later.
The sushi platter offered six crab rice rolls with a crunchy spiced filling that gave the sweet crab an intriguing kick. Also on the platter atop their mounds of sticky rice, were sea eel, shrimp, artic surf clam, and tamajo, a sweet strip of scrambled egg that combined nicely with hot wasabi and salty soy, dispensed from a white ceramic pot.
The tako yaki were six lightly fried balls of octopus and breading with a mild taste of the sea. It proved to be a tender and tasty offering that might even find favor with the fish finicky or the very young.
Vegetable tempura was an assortment of very fresh summer and winter squash, green beans and sweet potatoes, fried in tempura batter, with an accompanying sweet/savory dipping sauce.
The chicken fried rice was a generous plate of mildly seasoned fried rice with chicken and peas, carrots and beans. The menu states that for rice dishes, brown rice can be substituted.
The grand finale was tempura fried ice cream, a baseball-sized scoop of green tea ice cream fried in a crust of tempura batter and topped with whipped cream. Breaking through the batter crust to the slightly melted ice cream and pulling out a spoonful through a drift of whipped cream built anticipation that was rewarded upon first contact with the taste buds. It was a worthy splurge. Ice cream is available in several other flavors, including ginger and coconut.
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