Alex Oh Sushi & Rolls
Hours: Tue-Wed, 11:30am -10pm; Thur-Sat, 11:30am -10:30pm; Sun, 12pm- 9:30pm
It’s a busy Friday night at Alex Oh Sushi. The dining room is tiny, but full; the heat of the small crowd has the windows sweating against the outside cold. My friend is running late, so I sit at the counter and watch the chef at work while I wait for a table.
The air is light with the delicate smell of sushi rice and vinegar. The chef, Alex Oh, is behind the counter patting rice onto sheets of nori. As he constructs each roll he chooses from a row of fresh fish, fat slabs of pink, white and speckled grey, curls of octopus tentacles, strings of crab or a bowl of glistening roe.
A banana leaf is given a wipe and draped onto a plate. The chef slices through a dusky pink sheet of tuna, then a fatty pink streak of salmon. He moves the fish through his fingers, seeming to weigh and check the quality of his butchering by feel alone. He dips his hands into a bowl and cleans them with a quick clap. Another plate is loaded with rolls, topped with a sauce and scorched with a small blowtorch. A char bursts through that clean vinegar smell of moments ago.
I’ve had a lot of time to watch the goings on behind the counter: There is only one server. He is bouncing from group to group taking orders and delivering plates. The phone is an almost constant ring. It’s incredibly busy. Because I’m waiting, I’m happy to wave off attention. Still, the server brings by a cup of hot tea as an apology for any lack thereof. It’s a nice gesture.
My friend arrives and we spend enough time at the counter for the server to bring her a cup of tea as well. Eventually we slide into a table by the window. A beautiful bowl with a tangle of twigs, curls of pink fish and a bright yellow flower catches our eye, so we order a sashimi appetizer ($11). We get our own tapestry of twigs and cellophane noodles topped with rich butterfish (also known as that gastrointestinal roll of the dice, escolar), silky salmon and meaty, but somewhat mealy, albacore tuna.
We sip a Kirin Ichiban Shibori, one of the three Japanese beers available, as we enjoy the sunomono salad ($7), a vinegared seaweed salad topped with a thin slice of radish, sweet crab, slightly chewy octopus and luscious tuna leaning against scrunched cellophane noodles. Lemon and ponzu add to the brightness of the vinegar. It’s a great salad.
We also have the Hokkaido scallop ($11), which sees coins of scallop sitting atop gummy sushi rice croquettes—obviously microwaved—with little dabs of a garlic cream sauce and pops of orange fish roe. The scallop feels almost unnecessary: I would actually prefer the croquette with a more generous dollop of fish roe instead. We each indulge in more cream sauce with the sushi cup ($5), a tiny cup of rice, salmon and escolar topped with sauce and torched. The result is a warm, inventive snack.
The black dragon roll ($8) and the Alex roll special ($15) are both huge, snaking down the length of the plates. Both feature tempura shrimp, avocado and cucumber. The former has freshwater eel, sadly battered by the slicing of the rolls, while the former has fish roe and scallop, with a wonderfully spicy cream sauce drizzled overtop. They’re very good.
We finish the meal with black sesame ice cream ($3.50) brought in from Toronto. It’s thoughtfully split into two small spoon-shaped dishes. A single grape punctuates the meal. “A sweet finish,” our server says. This has felt more like a sweet beginning. I’ll be back.
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FIRST LOOK: Alex Oh Sushi & Rolls
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2015.
I’m really confused by this article. From the title and the parting words, it sounds like a new and exciting sushi experience in Halifax. But from everything in between, except for the sunomono, it comes across as a flop. Also crab and imitation crab are two very very different things (Imitation crab is a form of processed seafood made of finely pulverized white fish flesh — called surimi — typically using various whitefish. Creating surimi involves skinning, rinsing, grinding and cooking the fish into an odorless paste, before coloring and flavoring is added to resemble the leg meat of snow crab or Japanese spider crab.) Not distinguishing it from real crab either shows a lack of knowledge or caring. See someone try to pass off the same thing shoved into a lobster tail and call it lobster, with no imitation attached and I think we’d hear the sounds of an angry mob with pitch forks. They are understaffed, so that means you’ll be waiting a while and your food will probably be sitting out for a bit, that doesn’t exactly sound “So Good”. Also being that busy with one sushi chef means that corners will be cut, as you mentioned evidenced by poorly cut fish and rolls and less than high quality fish (really butterfish? I prefer to get my laxatives OTC, and mealy tuna ain’t gonna cut it). It also sounds like the chef is over handling the fish because he’s insecure with his cutting skills. The fish is meant to be cut expertly then handled as little as possible. Human hands impart heat, this is why women aren’t allowed to be sushi chefs in Japan, our hands become too hot at some point in the moon cycle. And sorry wait a second here “We also have the Hokkaido scallop ($11), which sees coins of scallop sitting atop gummy sushi rice croquettes—obviously microwaved—with little dabs of a garlic cream sauce and pops of orange fish roe. The scallop feels almost unnecessary” This is acceptable how? They microwave items that were originally fried, and the scallops are so unimpressive on the clumps of gummy microwaved pre-fried rice that you would rather have flying fish roe on top of them. Why even bother the whole thing sounds terrible for $11, I would have gotten up and walked to Chianti and ordered their calamari to wash away the terrible memory of that meal. $13 and it’s a sure thing every time. Oh and for $23 they gave you two rolls that were essentially the same (dynamite inside) with some random poorly handled outsides and some sauce. Oh and now that I’m all fired up, they put sticks and flowers on the same plate as food? Unless those flowers were grown in an organic garden, there are some pretty strong pesticides on that plate, and the sticks/twigs, it looks like they reuse them and then they become a food safety issue. Also, and I honestly can’t believe there is another also here, you said that he washed his hands by dipping them in water and clapping his hands together, because clapping scares the germs away? I’ll be sure to pass that technique on the infection control team at the hospital I work at, how foolish they will feel when they realize how much time, warm running water, and soap have been wasted all in the name of proper hand washing and hygiene, when apparently the secret all along was to dip your hands in water that has been dipped in many a time and then enthusiastically clap your hands together. Here’s a hint, he’s not washing his hands, he’s dipping them in the water to make the rice easier to handle. Sweet beginning? More like a sweet No Thank You.
Word. This might help http://novascotia.ca/agri/programs-and-ser… before they end up with a failing grade at http://www.novascotia.ca/agri/foodsafety/r…