Title: Kakui Sushi
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Kakui Sushi in Oakland, CA – update, lunch
http://www.kakuisushi.com/menu.html (click on lower RH edge for lunch menu, which is very short)
Review date: April 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

We came here for dinner with Inez back on July 2012. The meal was good if oddly paced, not the best but a couple of dishes were appealing. In our search for another Japanese stalwart which can please the wildly differing tastes of Carlos, Inez, and me, we decided to come back to Kakui to try lunch.

Lunch was less crowded than I remember dinner as being, which is nice as this restaurant can be pretty noisy. We were surprised by how different the lunch menu was from the old dinner menu we remember, so we took a little extra time to consider the possibilities.

Kakui offers a dish called komatsuna, which is kale cooked with miso and garlic. I love all three, so I ordered it. A bowl of loose, rich miso broth, well seasoned with garlic, was more like a really good miso soup which happened to have wilted chopped kale in it. Neither Carlos nor Inez are kale lovers, so I finished most of it. I would happily order this again, and wish more restaurants would offer it. Much as I love oshitashi, pressed spinach with dashi and sesame, it's tiresome for it to be the only green vegetable that isn't deep-fried in 99% of Japanese restaurants.

We asked for two orders of the gyoza – everything here is in fairly small portions. Kakui gives you six tiny deep-fried gyoza. I was fine with them; Carlos was disappointed. He keeps thinking they are pan-fried like Chinese potstickers, but the Japanese restaurants all went to deep-frying decades ago (easier and cheaper) and now it's the only way they come. If you don't mind them being crispy, Kakui does a decent rendition.

Inez likes to have a bowl of miso soup, so we ordered one for her. It's good, not great. Carlos got the starter size of the shrimp tempura, which was good-sized for the price and nicely executed, especially compared to the disgusting renditions we've received recently from Mijori and Kansai, both in Oakland. 

The long list of rolls confused Inez, but she finally picked out a California roll, probably more for the familiarity of the name than anything else. Kakui's rolls are small, but she's fine with this. With the miso soup and a couple of shrimp, she had enough to eat.

I ordered the katsu-don, which looked wonderful when it arrived. I was surprised to find the scrambled egg rather salty, but the vegetables were a decent assortment, properly cooked, and the pork tonkatsu seemed a reasonable size. The problem arose when Carlos' entrée of the 10-piece hamachi sashimi arrived. 

First of all, the hamachi was pure white with a light pink top. As hamachi isn't white, this was rather suspicious. Carlos took one bite, and immediately said to me, "This doesn't taste right. The texture is strange somehow."

He gave the rest of the slice to me. The fish was fresh, but very mild; not buttery as good hamachi is. Instead of the soft texture hamachi has, this was firmer – not chewy or hard, just very firm.

Then they brought him a bowl of white rice, and he thought it tasted strange, too. He passed it to me. I took one small bite and said, "It's spoiled." I called the waiter over and handed him the bowl to return to the kitchen. 

They brought another bowl of rice, but this one was also spoiled. The off-taste was faint but when you eat as much rice as we do, it's unmistakable. Rice spoils very easily once cooked; if you're going to keep it overnight you need to cool it down fast and refrigerate it ASAP.  

Refusing any more rice, Carlos finished the sashimi by itself, but said he didn't like the unexpected texture difference. I said I thought it looked more like escolar, the "super white tuna" which is a cheaper and less digestible fish the industry is attempting to push as an alternative to the traditional sashimi varieties (many of which have their own issues of sustainability and high mercury levels). You can read about the warnings on escolar, suitably dubbed "the Ex-Lax fish", at: http://www.thekitchn.com/use-caution-when-eating-escola-66602 

With Carlos having freshness issues with his rice, I was inclined to view my own rice bowl rather dubiously. The problem was the sweet soya sauce was already added to the rice – which made it impossible to tell if my own rice was going bad or not. I decided to err on the conservative side, and just ate the meat and vegetables.

It's never a good thing for a restaurant to be unaware they're serving spoiled food. But it's another thing altogether to be selling a cheaper, more dangerous fish (some people, Carlos fortunately not amongst them, have a serious reaction to escolar) labeled as super-premium hamachi, making the cavalier assumption that your customers are too stupid to tell the difference. 

We aren't, we can, and we don't need to waste either money or time on a restaurant with unethical and unsafe food issues.

Needless to say, we won't be back. Ever.

Three people, lunch: five starters, one roll, one sashimi plate, one rice bowl, with tip was $95.

Kakui Sushi 
20608 Mountain Blvd., Oakland, CA
http://www.kakuisushi.com/
Review date: July 2012

Branching out from our tried-and-true favorite Ta-Ke Sushi, we decided to try Kakui, a more upscale, leaning-towards-fusion place that is a popular stop in the Montclair Village neighborhood, a mere ten minutes away from our Laurel neighborhood home. It's got that 'modern bistro' look, matched with a higher-than-average noise level and complete with rap music that keeps the three young sushi chefs jivving. 

Presentation is elegant at Kakui, ingredients are of high quality, and service is good although we were forced to ask the waitress several times for foods that were free, but are not brought automatically to the table. We weren't given any rice with our tempura, for example; nor do they ask if you want any hot tea.

Carlos looked askance at this, until I pointed out to him that except for the staff, we were the only Asians out of an almost full dining room. 

The food we ordered arrived in a haphazard order, as if the kitchen was making dishes without any plan for a natural progression of starters first, entrees second. So although we ordered two starters and three entrees, one of the entrees, a mixed (shrimp & vegetable) tempura arrived first, well before anything else showed up.

Inez always likes a bowl of miso soup, which is strictly a la carte at Kakui. It's $3 for a small bowl, and is adequate but no more than that. There's little depth of flavor or interest, which is odd because Kakui makes an excellent dashi broth, which is the basis for miso soup. 

A small dish of the undiluted dashi was served with the mixed shrimp and vegetable tempura Carlos and I shared. All of the servings at Kakui are modest, which is good for ordering a variety of dishes to share. The tempura has two slender shrimp, and a nice selection of vegetables. Sadly, the rice is a nice pearl grain but slightly al dente, which neither of us approve of – we're sticky rice fans; the gummier the better, as far as we're concerned.

When we were finished with the tempura, the agedashi tofu starter showed up. This is three 1"x2" rectangles of fresh tofu, with a generous amount of good-quality bonita shreds (dried salted tuna) mixed into the tempura batter. Carlos is very fond of this dish, I'm less so. But we both loved Kakui's version. I would come back here just for this dish, and probably order multiples. More of that excellent dashi is the sauce the tofu is soaking in, along with a small quantity of that rarest of culinary items, finely grated true wasabi root.

Genuine wasabi has a spicy bite reminiscent of ginger but with a floral accent that ginger lacks. Like ginger, it is tempered with a sweetness that the more aggressive horseradish (the main component in 99% of the bright green wasabi pastes you've eaten) can't match. It's almost worth the trip out here just to try the wasabi, if you've never had it before. 

(Carlos actually prefers the fake stuff, since he loves the sensation of the horseradish making the top of his head explode – his words exactly. Different strokes for different folks, I guess!)

The chicken kara-age was awful. Small stringy bits of over-fried dark meat chicken in half a teaspoon of housemade teriyaki sauce, was a complete loser. Considering that Ta-Ke, our favorite, has given us one good version of this but also one equally bad, it's enough to make you wonder why McDonald's is the only one who can consistently deep-fry a piece of boneless chicken meat without murdering it.

Inez got the Four Seasons roll. Kakui makes 5-slice sushi, much more modest than the usual 8-slice rolls. They are nicely done, however, and the Four Seasons is unagi (BBQ eel), cucumber, topped with crab, raw tuna, and avocado. She liked this, and loved dipping it in the beautifully striped trio of sauces: remoulade, wasabi mayo, and teriyaki (all housemade). Mixed, they made a tasty sauce for her roll: creamy, sweet, and slightly spicy. 

Carlos got the ten-piece assorted sashimi, chef's choice. It was very high quality, but is priced around $5 more than Ta-Ke. Again, the presentation is beautiful: the sashimi is arranged in a wide-rimmed soup bowl, atop shredded daikon and white pickled ginger. The green wasabi is decoratively smeared across the bottom third of the bowl's rim, looking like a green wave rising towards the seafood. 

I decided to order the futomaki roll, but disappointingly, there was no tamago in it, although the menu listed it as one of the ingredients. The chef used inari instead (bean-curd skin deep-fried and soaked in teriyaki sauce), which to me was a poor substitute. I liked the use of wakame, the bright green seaweed salad, but not the paper thin raw zucchini, which is flavorless in this multiple-vegetable filling. 

Overall, Kakui scored some very good points, but fell down in a few places. What they do well, they do very well indeed, and it's nice to see the locals supporting them. Times are still tough and there's several empty storefronts in Montclair Village that are all too visible (the business district is only two blocks deep and half a mile long).

They won't replace Ta-Ke in our eyes (and stomachs), but they're different enough that we want to come back and try some of the other items on the menu. They're similar to Ching Hua/Alameda – trying to move the target a little more upscale, with food that's familiar but with a more modern edge to it.

Three people, dinner: Two starters, two entrees, two sushi rolls, one sashimi plate, with tip was $100.