Robin Garr's LOUISVILLE Restaurant Reviews

89	Sakura Blue 4600 Shelbyville Road, Suite 210 (502) 897-3600

If you were disappointed to see Bonsai close its doors this summer after a long run on Dupont Road, you'll be delighted to know that it hasn't gone away but simply moved to a new St. Matthews location, with an upscale new look and a new name - Sakura Blue - but the same management and a similar bill of fare.

Sakura (Japanese for "cherry tree," the friendly sushi chef explained) now occupies spacious quarters in the recently renovated Shelbyville Road Plaza, next door to the St. Matthews Post Office and just down the strip from Hawley-Cooke.

We dropped in for a quick bite the other day, and were beguiled into a long, expansive sushi lunch in which we sampled just about everything, ate too much and spent too much, and liked it all. My conclusion? Even with the dramatic increase in local sushi bars in the past year or so, Sakura Blue ranks - as Bonsai did - in my personal "top three" for sushi.

Shopping center space often equates to blandness, but Sakura's designers avoided that trap, decorating the dining room in an attractive if rather minimalist Japanese style. Off-white walls and accents of blue bringing together dinner tables at the front. Large tables-for-eight extend back along one wall with built-in teppanyaki grills where slice-and-dice chefs put on a food-as-performance-art show. And along the remaining side of the room, you can settle in at an impressive 12-seat sushi bar of dark mahogany and a "roof" of blue tiles. Soft classical music playing in the background enhanced the upscale tone.

The dinner menu appears very similar to Bonsai's familiar bill of fare but with most prices bumped up about 15 percent. You'll find about 20 appetizers, topping out at $7.50 for fried soft-shell crab; and 14 dinner entrees from $7.95 (for a bowl of udon wheat noodles or soba buckwheat noodles) to $20.95 (for a bento box, a Japanese specialty featuring a variety of items artfully arrayed in a divided black-lacquer box).

I usually head for the sushi bar first in any new Japanese restaurant, and that was an excellent decision here. The sushi chefs are gregarious and speak fluent English, and they're expert at their work.

The sushi list, even without counting daily specials, is one of the longest and most diverse in the region, with some 60 items that range from $1.50 (for an order of Uzura quail-egg sushi) to $11.95 (for "Akiko's roll," a California roll topped with eel). Three chef's choice combo plates are $14.95 (for a selection of sushi with soup) to $19.95 (for a sushi-sashimi combination or all-sashimi plate).

If you're fuzzy on your Japanese terminology, recall that sushi is a bite-size piece of fish (or occasionally other food) perched on a ball of rice ("Nigiri"), or fish rolled in the center of a round of rice wrapped in edible black nori seaweet ("Maki"). Sashimi is unadorned, artfully cut pieces of fish, with rice on the side. Sushi and sashimi usually involve raw fish, but some items (shrimp, usually, "surimi" fake crab, egg omelet nigiri and a few others) are cooked. If you're squeamish but would like to try sushi, ask the chef which items don't have the raw bites.

We ordered a few standard items followed by a couple of Sakura specialties. White tuna ($3.75), Saba (mackerel, $3) and Tako (octopus, $3.50) nigiri-sushi were all fine, with impeccably fresh and flavorful fish carefully formed over tangy sushi rice. (In a departure from the Japanese norm, the chef told us that he offers the sinus-clearing green wasabi horseradish on the side but does not build it in to the sushi pieces, so each diner can apply the dose desired.

A couple of maki rolls were fine, too - Avocado roll ($2.95) and Tekkamaki (fresh tuna, $4).

Fried salmon skin, crisp and salty, is something like a Japanese answer to pork rinds. Tucked into maki rolls (Salmon skin roll, $4.50), it's hard to eat just one.

"Louisville roll" ($8.95), perhaps so-called because each piece is topped with a ripe cardinal-red strawberry, came about as close to being a sushi dessert as anything I've tried. Eight "inside-out" maki rounds (rice on the outside, nori seaweed within) contained strips of salty eel and crisp cucumber along with a dab of cream cheese, of all things; each round bore a slice of avocado and the aforementioned strawberry. The plate was decorated with bite-size bits of sweet Valencia oranges and drizzled with a sweetish sauce. It was unusual, even idiosyncratic, but it passed the test: We didn't stop eating until it was gone.

As I have often noted before, sushi is good, but sushi is not cheap. These hand-crafted bites of food-as-art quickly add up, especially when they are so good that you keep coming back for more. Our sushi meal topped out at $40.77, plus a $7.03 tip for service and another five bucks in the chef's tip glass. $$$

(August 2002)