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Put yourself in Fugakyu's hands
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When you want the best sushi experience around, many choose Fugakyu, aka "The house of exquisite elegance." It's the area's largest Japanese restaurant, and it is a multi-level, elegant spot that attracts ballplayers and celebrities. The sushi bar's river with wooden boats carrying nigiri and maki to be plucked by diners is pretty fun, although only offered Sunday-Tuesday. There's screened-off private rooms and a hidden cocktail bar, and kimono'd waitresses.
But forget the celebrities and the bar and the TV and the closed-off rooms. The spot you want is right in front of the sushi chef.
Fugakyu offers an "Omakase" set dinner with the chef's choice of six courses, including soup, appetizers, sashimi, sushi, makimono, a kitchen entree and dessert, for $80; for a smaller sampling, the mini kaiseki set for $35, $45 with wine pairing, offers items such as miso shiru, shichimi edamae, seaweed salad, assorted maki, kumamoto oysters, and other delicacies. Or just go ala cart, and let chefs like Master Sushi Chef Hiromi Ruhan take care of you.
Ruhan is inventive and charming, and funny. But most importantly, he's passionate about what he serves up. They have their own fish tank, so the fish is the freshest it can be. They do fly in Japanese fish in season, too.
If you aren't counting pennies -- or calories -- working with the sushi chef is the best dining experience ever.
While he makes one dish, he asks us questions about what we like and don’t like, and he just improvises. He throws in whatever fresh veggies are around, too. It’s all presented artfully, with a combination of American and rare Japanese ingredients. We have the rich salmon belly, sample mango seaweed salad with house-smoked salmon, and eat Amaebi. or sweet shrimp, served raw with the tempura fried head alongside. "Some people get scared with the head part, but that's part of the fun of it, for me."
What's especially fun is learning about the various ingredients the chef uses. He keeps a theme, serving up dishes that are fall-centric. One dish featured matsutake, or pine mushrooms, a highly prized and expensive woodsy, meaty, crunchy Japanese mushroom that is somewhere between a porcini and a portobello shaped like a Q-tip. Grilled cuttle fish with a little avocado, salmon and shrimp is heated up with cayenne and Japanese mayo, with a little sweet eel sauce. Monkfish liver -- "foie gras of the sea" -- served pate style and steamed with sake, is mild, served in a cocktail glass with ponzu sauce and other garnish. It's terrific. Then he gets the idea that I love the real deal foie gras, and brings pan fried goose liver, with spicy daikon radish, scallion, sesame & ponzu sauce, served artfully alongside raw scallops, and something he calls "marijuana sushi," aka fluke rolled into a shiso leaf that looked like an illicit substance.
He'll figure out what you do and don't like, and will also see if he can push you to try something you might have had a bad experience with. I was wary about trying uni, which elsewhere I have always found too strong and mushy, but in Ruhan's hands, I was surprised about how good his version was, firm and savory. "Late September-November is the best time of year to eat sea urchins," he said. "It's like apples and oranges. There are Pacific and Atlantic ones; these are from Maine. We shuck them ourselves."
"It's never the same," said the chef, who grew up in Hawaii with deep Japanese roots. "I do what's in season. This is my choice, it may never be the same. That’s what makes it magic. A little dash of this. We’re thinking that you'll never really get tired of coming here, because there's so many different kinds of things to try. People come in and they just want vegetables, I have done it before. Anyway you want us to do it we can do it. I like when I have free rein to do whatever I want to do. Every chef has a trick up their sleeve, they want you to come back. Our menu is huge."
Fugakyu isn't all about exotics -- there's also dumplings and tempura and shrimp teriyaki if you want some familiar items, but then you can also try thinly sliced ostrich steak. Same with the drinks -- there's sake, and sake-infused cocktails. We started with the Zentini and other Japanese-inspired cocktails. Try a drink with Ty-ku, a sake, shochu and fruit juice liqueur, for a Tyku mojito -- with crushed shiso leaf, lime juice, soda water and syrup, for $10, or a martini with Grey Goose orange and splash of cranberry juice, $9. But with our meal, we found them a little distracting with the fish, and so switched to Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, which was sweet and crisp.
After several rounds with Ruhan, we cry uncle, and he insists on dessert, a mountain peach that's very citrusy, a nice dessert to cleanse the palate. At the end, we were full but happy and enriched at the same time.
He said he couldn't wait to see us again, because he likes customers who put themselves in his able hands. But he also kept emphasizing that he'll make anything you want. For a New Orleans customer, he made sushi with bacon and scallops. "Believe me, if you brought a Snickers and you wanted it, I would do it," Ruhan said.
He'll make sushi with chicken and beef and hot sauce and cream cheese, too, a post-Iron Chef trend in America he finds amusing. "We use everything now, not like in Japan which is more traditional," he says. The only trend he dislikes is the fast-food sushi in malls and supermarkets. "They don’t necessarily use the higher quality items," he warns. "It doesn't taste as good."
For more info: Fugakyu, 1280 Beacon St., Brookline, (617) 734-1268.
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