Sliding past the sushi bar at Koi

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Scoot up to the sushi bar at Koi and you begin a familiar ritual: figure out the day’s freshest fish, order a couple cuts and then snap your chopsticks apart, shaving away splinters until the things are whittled down to dull little spears. It’s a second-nature process for most and one that’s only enhanced by the fact that the restaurant feels familiar, too. The warm woods and baby bamboo seem like they could be borrowed from nearly any Japanese restaurant, as do the pendant lamps hanging above in full bloom.

As a result, Koi can at first seem like an unremarkable link in the long-commodified sushi business. But the place is far more than a few stools at the bar—the restaurant travels well beyond sushi.

Koi proves its versatility almost instantly with a rotating menu of appetizers, which swaps specials every two weeks. When your timing’s right, you can catch Koi’s excellent Kurobuta pork belly (resting on puréed potatoes and bok choy) and steamed tilefish (turned completely tender in a broth flecked with cherry blossoms).

There are also a number of more permanent plates to start. Here, the dishes range from sautéed Hudson Valley foie gras to kushiyaki, a set of ribeye meatballs grilled on bamboo skewers. Some of these starters run rich, but the restaurant’s salmon skin salad is a light fix. Koi’s version of the salad is flawless, with wafers of cucumber tossed with white onions and hunks of salmon still clinging to their crisp bits of skin. The dish is topped by a pile of radish sprouts and bonito shavings and dressed with a tataki sauce—a clean plate packed with even cleaner flavors.

Entrées are less varied but still maintain Koi’s appetizer quality. Nearly all of Koi’s bigger dishes are almost too typical, with teriyaki and katsu plates claiming most of the entrée page. But Koi’s two katsu cuts (chicken and pork) are good ones, rendered weightless by their panko crusts. There are also the combination plates, which pair various entrées with sushi or sashimi, a salad, smoky miso soup and rice.

Even with all these options, though, you can’t and won’t pass up Koi’s sushi bar. Those looking for California rolls and the like (which Koi dresses up with smelt eggs) might as well punch a few numbers and grab their sushi from a vending machine—Koi is too pricey and too keen on quality to waste an order on something so expendable. Instead, pick the simple Seal Beach roll, which wraps tuna, avocado and a spear of shrimp in thin slices of cucumber. The roll resembles a watermelon—the cucumber taking the place of the striped rind, the ruby-red tuna standing in for the fruit’s fleshy interior—and eats with the same refreshing grace. Although it isn’t a perfect piece of sushi, it’s a standout in the world of so-called “specialty rolls.”

For the purest fish there’s Koi’s nigiri sushi and sashimi. Koi’s fish is uniformly good—there’s nothing of triple-digit quality, but the restaurant goes well beyond other nearby sushi spots. The proof is in the popular standbys: yellowfin and toro, two widely ordered types of tuna. The yellowfin is great, mild and easily matched by the tiniest pinch of wasabi. The toro bears Koi’s standards, too, though it’s a comparatively bland bite for such a fatty cut of fish.

After just a single stop, you’ll figure out that there are three main ways to build a meal at Koi: started and finished solely by appetizers, filled in the middle by an entrée or served slowly and precisely at the sushi bar. But Koi is a restaurant built for small plates, ideal for a delicate piece of pork belly to sit alongside an even more fragile piece of fish. So if you pick from just one end of the restaurant’s menu, you’ll probably regret it. And that’s something even the tallest bottle of Orion can’t cure.

KOI 600 PACIFIC COAST HWY SUITE 100 | SEAL BEACH 90740 | 562.431.1186 | KOISUSHI.COM | OPEN FOR LUNCH MON-FRI 11:30AM-2PM | AND FOR DINNER SUN-THURS 5-9:30PM | FRI-SAT 5-10PM | FOOD FOR TWO $40-75

Tags: Food, japanese, koi, seal beach, sushi