Restaurant Review: Hakubai

Hakubai is the Kitan's flagship restaurant, serving very traditional Japanese food in a very traditional Japanese restaurant setting. The restaurant is run by a chef, who worked at the famous Nadaman Restaurant chain in Japan, which is known for their Kaiseki style preparation of Japanese food.

Nice atmosphere. Truly transported me back to Japan and away from the hustle and bustle of NYC.

Yuba Tofu with sweet soy sauce topped with Sea Urchin and wasabi.

Beautiful flavor combination between the naturally sweet Sea Urchin with the silkiness of the yuba tofu. The two ingredients complimented each other very well. I might try this one at home!

Assorted Sushi set.

So I ordered sushi, since I've pretty much been craving it all week. It was really disappointing. The freshness of the fish was fine, and the fish was fresh, but the sushi rice really bothered me. Good sushi rice has a subtle sourness and sweetness from the use of sushi rice vinegar. Good rice should also be rested overnight to so-called "ferment" in order to gain more depth in flavor, giving the rice great texture, flavor, and sweetness. This sushi rice truly lacked any subtle sweetness or flavor, and it was disappointing.

Sashimi with Miso Soup

The sashimi was nothing special. The quality of the fish was below par. Pretty much something that I could have bought at my local Japanese food market. Really nothing to say here.

Renkon rice cake with dashi, momiji-oroshi, and crispy burdock root

Renkon is a type of Japanese root that is commonly stewed, steamed, or deepfried. In this case, the chef ground it with some rice flour, Japanese yams, etc. to make a rice cake, then fried it. I found the flavor combination to be a bit bland. The dashi was rather salty, and I felt no trace of depth to it.

Chilean Sea Bass with gohoku-mai rice.

Seabass was seasoned with sweet cooking sake, and soy. Pretty standard broiled fish. The Chilean Sea Bass was nice, but nothing special. Something I could have easily made at home. I eat gohoku-mai at my home anyway, so not a great dish here.

Japanese Yogurt Desert with Homemade Mango Ice Cream.

The ice cream was nice, with a big of tang, and the right amount of sweetness, letting the mango flavor truly shine. The yogurt was rather sour, and unfortunately, very unappetizing.

So what did I think of Hakubai? I've had some truly spectacular Japanese food throughout my life. Looking at the atmosphere, the menu, and the reviews of this restaurant, I was expecting something very special. My meal was nothing more pedestrian than your average Japanese restaurant down the street. Hakubai claims to have great Kaiseki style Japanese food, with a true commitment to quality. Unfortunately, i can't believe that. And the price. 30 bucks for a small plate of rather disappointing sushi, and 50 bucks for a small Kaiseki meal, which my parents ordered. I expected these prices, being in Manhattan, but not the quality of the food. Hakubai has to step it up to be called an elite Japanese restaurant in NYC.

Restaurant Review: Neptune Oyster

After a horrible experience at Legal Seafood, I was craving some better seafood. I came across Neptune Oyster, considered the BEST OYSTER BAR in Boston according to Yelp.

Neptune Oyster has a very nice atmosphere, with a clean marble bar along with several tables. It really seemed like a communal oyster bar, where the locals come.
Now, let the seafood feast begin.

Triton Plateau platter: Came with local raw oysters, raw littleneck clams, raw hamaguri clams, gigantic shrimp cocktail, steamed lobster with aeoli, lump crab, and steamed mussels. Starting off with the oysters, truly marvelous oysters, with a creamy finish and almost a slight cucumbery taste to them. Exquisite. The littleneck clams were spectacular as well; sweet, plump, and slightly salty. The hamaguri clams were incredible, having an enormous amount of natural sweetness similar to that of diver scallops. The shrimp cocktail was gigantic, almost being the size of small lobsters. Usually larger shrimp tend to lose their natural sweetness and texture. It wasn't the case here, as the shrimp had great texture and just the right amount of natural sweetness to counterbalance the cocktail sauce provided. The combination of succulent lobster and creamy aeoli was magnificent. The lump crab may have been the weakest part of the platter, as i felt that there was too much mayonnaise in the lump crab mixture; nevertheless, the crab had great texture and natural sweetness to it. The mussels were plump and delicious, much better than the ones from Legal Seafood last night.

Grilled calamari salad with market greens and olive tapenade. The squid was very fresh and plump, and by charring it on the grill, it brought out a smokiness that brought the dish to another level. Nice.

Tuna sandwich with fries. Nice, but there were better things on the menu. I don't really know why my dad ordered this. He regretted it, and would have rather ordered the Lobster Roll instead.

I wasn't quite full yet after the platter, so I decided to order a dozen more oysters. I had my waiter help me pick a random assortment of local oysters. Stupidly, I forgot to write down the names of the oysters, but let me tell you they were pretty much the best oysters I've had in my life. What truly set these oysters apart from the oysters I've been eating before are the different flavor profiles they had; many had cucumbery after tastes, some had a buttery finish, and some were extremely brinny. These oysters were delicious.

So what do I think of Neptune Oyster? I love it. Its truly what I look for whenever I travel and search for great restaurants: clean, communal, fresh, and local. I shared my experience at Legal Seafood with my waiter at Neptune, and he simply said that a chain as large as Legal Seafood truly cannot control the freshness level compared to the small, communal oyster bar like Neptune. I'll definitely be coming back to Neptune someday, hopefully in the near future!

Restaurant Review: Legal Seafood (Kendall Square)

So this is the first restaurant review that I am writing for the blog. Let me tell you a few things about what I do when I critic a restaurant.
I love eating out.
But I hate spending my money on bad food or food that I could have easily made in my own kitchen.
I get critical when it comes to bad service, dirty bathrooms, bad plating, and bad ingredients. If something doesn't taste good, I send it back to the kitchen for them to remake it. If it still doesn't taste good, I never come back to the restaurant.
If I don't really mention the service, bathrooms, plating, ingredients, it pretty much means that they were fine. Otherwise I felt just neutral about it and I didn't really care.

Now... onto the review...

So right now I'm in Boston, checking out a college that I got accepted in. We flew in at 3:30, and my entire family was pretty much starving once we arrived in the hotel at 4:30, so we ate dinner at the local Legal Seafood restaurant.

Legal Seafood is a Boston based restaurant chain that is famous for having fresh seafood. It has the usual American seafood classics: shrimp cocktail, oysters on the half-shell, steamed lobster, crabcakes, etc.

Legal Seafood is known for having exceptional oysters, so we ordered a dozen oysters, three of each variety:

Cape Cod Oysters: Very full bodied/meaty oysters, with a clean finish and a brininess that didn't overpower my palate. Nice.

Kumamotos Oysters: Kumamotos are typically grown in the west coast, them being the smallest variety of the oyster in the dozen we got. Nice clean flavor, but drastically having a more briny flavor compared to the Cape Cods. These were not the best Kumamotos I have had, and they were rather disappointing.

New Jersey Oysters: Similar to the Cape Cod Oysters, with that classic oyster flavor. Nothing more to be said here.

Five Star Oysters from Canada: Good clean flavor, and a nice after taste. Brininess was at a perfect level.

There was cocktail sauce and mignonette. The cocktail sauce overpowers the brininess of the oysters, and the mignonette simply tasted bad; it had no kick from the raw oysters and was rather bland. The oysters were eaten with just a squeeze of lemon.


Steamed lobster, with steamed mussels, little-neck clams, corn, and chorizo, accompanied with melted butter and clam stock.

The lobster was nice, especially the claws, having the classic lobster flavor: a natural sweetness in the meat, with a unparalleled texture in the claws that is truly unique to lobster meat. I felt the lobster was steamed a little too long, however, as the tail meat seemed unusually tough.

Before ordering this, I understood that because it is an odd season for shellfish right now, with alot of them mating during the spring, shellfish tend to accumulate sand in its flesh. The clams and mussels, in this dish, had an overwhelming amount of sand in the flesh, to the extent where they were inedible. Pretty disgusting. I had to complain to my waiter, and we were able to get another batch of steamed little neck clams, which were better, but still had a significant amount of sand in them. They were left largely untouched.

So what do I think of Legal Seafood? Its an average, maybe even below average seafood restaurant. Legal Seafood claims to always have the freshest and most flavorful seafood around, but I still can't get over the Kumamotos, and steamed mussels and clams. Now I understand that getting the sand out of the clams is impossible, and my incident with the shellfish may be inevitable, but I believe that Legal Seafood has to be more responsible for what they bring out to their customers. Legal Seafood claims to have the freshest and most flavorful seafood in the area, but I highly doubt that.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll venture into a better seafood restaurant.