It seems too difficult for us to leave Ginza so we might as well keep coming back~ When it comes to making a reservation for a restaurant you have your hearts on, I’ve noticed a growing level of difficulty in successfully pulling this through, especially when what you fancy is sushi. Some Michelin-starred sushi places simply do not take bookings directly from customers or they are simply booked out as soon as when they start taking bookings. These high-end restaurants usually start taking bookings from the first day of each month, so you have to make a phone call at the earliest hour possible as most of them do not have online booking systems. You might be thinking that Japan is such a pioneer in everything technological, but you will grow to know that they also like to keep their traditional way of doing things in certain areas. If you look out for reservation agents either on the Internet or App Store, you may find quite a few of them providing such services of booking a table for you at the expense of some commission fee.
So here we are at 銀座 凛 にしむら Ginza Rin Nishimura for a lunchtime omakase nigiri (おまかせ握り). The restaurant is tiny with mainly counter seats and even the chef himself doesn’t have ample working space, either. Yet, it feels quite cozy and somewhat intimate like being invited into a friend’s house for a really nice meal and this friend happens to be a sushi master. First course is probably not designed to calm you down (especially when you vey much likely have got lost in trying to find this restaurant in the big big city of Tokyo), however, its creamy texture will no doubt lull you into a wonderful journey full of flavours – soup of fish testicles.
Kohada is the most representative fish for Edo-mae sushi style and it has beautiful silvery skin and a subtle umami flavour. What follows next are squid, amberjack and saba. Slight sweetness of the squid simply permeates in your mouth the second you start biting it. As the colour of the fish goes darker dish by dish, the depth of flavour grows more prominent. You would probably find yourself tasting the peak of umami flavour when savouring saba in the mouth – I wish I could have a bite of that now…
Then the chef brings you another level of intensity in the oceanic flavour with bluefin tuna (Maguro in Japanese) – akami, chutoro and otoro. Akami is a slice of tuna from around its spine, rich deep red in flesh with a profound flavour; chutoro is said to have a well-balanced flavour with moderate distribution of fat, delivering a sensational taste. Otoro, king of sushi, is cut from the fattiest part of tuna and a bite of it is simply a divine joy.
The following session offers a variety of different seafoods – salmon roe, oyster, tiger prawn, sea eel and sea urchin gonads. All of these jewels from the sea have their distinctive flavours and it is like going deeper into the sea as you savour each dish.
Lastly, miso soup and tamagoyaki are served, indicating the ending of this lovely delectable course. Have a little conversation with the chef while sipping matcha – pleased to find out that we share the same viewpoint in that saba is the most flavoursome fish and tastes great in nigiri.
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7-2-8 Token Building B1, Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
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Floating in the Space of Vision 2 - a journey of food and travel in photos 