Jan 31, 2014
Nama Sushi
3400 Fruitvale Ave. @MacArthur, Oakland, CA
http://namadimond.blogspot.com/
Review date: January 2014

In our seemingly endless search for another Japanese restaurant that will satisfy Carlos, Inez, and me, we finally got around to trying the Japanese restaurant closest to us, in the next-door Dimond district. 

This small commercial area has a selection of good stores - Peet's coffee, La Farine Bakery, an independent meat market (which we confess to never having tried), an excellent independent specialty grocery, and a number of restaurants of the modest neighborhood type.

One of these is Nama Sushi. It has been open for a while, getting average (3 to 3.5 stars) on Yelp. It turns out that as with most of the Oakland Japanese restaurants, what you want to order will make the difference as to whether you like Nama, or whether it will elicit merely a shrug of the shoulders.

Parking is easy, with a free lot behind the row of stores on Fruitvale. This is almost unheard-of in Oakland or Berkeley these days, and alone might be worth a star on its own, LOL. 

Nama is in a small building, but it's surprisingly spacious on the inside. It's a handsome room with a small backyard patio. The kitchen is in the back, a drinks/take-out counter is to the right, and the sushi bar is placed in front of the kitchen, middle center. This leaves a large L-shaped area for tables, and even allows for spacious aisles.

All this space is a disadvantage when, as happened when we came for lunch on a Friday, one frazzled young waitress had to serve the entire room. She seated people, gave them menus, got their drinks, served them food, wrote up the checks, and afterwards bussed the tables. To say she earned her salary and tips that afternoon would be an understatement!

As is often the case nowadays, no one on the staff at Nama is Japanese. The line cook was Chinese, the sushi maker Caucasian, and the waitress Hispanic. Carlos and I get a kick out of seeing changes like this – well, as long as the food doesn't suffer!

The menu list at Nama is very long, especially for the sushi rolls. There's a small flipchart with photos, but there's only a few rolls shown. Inez finds menus with long lists of descriptions very confusing and is inclined to have us order for her. 

It was obvious the waitress was really busy. It took her almost fifteen minutes to come over to take our order, so Inez had plenty of time to read the menu through. She finally picked a Kani roll, of surimi crab and avocado. There's a fair amount of discrepancy in the sizes of some of these rolls, and as Kani is one of the smaller ones she was happy with it. She was somewhat disappointed that there was no drizzle of teriyaki sauce, however. She likes the "wet" rolls, but Nama doesn't seem to offer any rolls with anything but a squiggle of spicy mayo. 

Carlos ordered the gyoza to start. Although listed as meat, they tasted only of cabbage and onion to me, which is typical these days. Carlos said the sauce was ridiculously salty, made up of a very small amount of dashi and a large amount of soya.

He chose the Rainbow Roll, a slightly more substantial roll than Inez's Kani. It had a similar filling of surimi crab, but was topped with assorted slices of sashimi and thin slices of avocado. He said it was adequate, nothing remarkable.

I started out with the Tako Sunomono, pickled octopus salad. A few thin slices of octopus along with a tablespoonful of various little octopus ends were piled atop thin-sliced cucumber sprinkled with sesame seeds. There were a few thin slices of raw radish for a nice bit of color. The pickling was light on the rice vinegar, accented with some salt. Like Genki's/Berkeley sunomono, I loved this old-fashioned treatment, and Carlos said he would definitely order this for himself next time we come.

There was a lunch special of Korean bibimbop served hot, and I chose it with spicy pork teriyaki. I received a generous bowlful, although this is stoneware, not the traditional cast-iron bowl, so no crust forms. But the gojuchang used was only very slightly sweet, with a good lip-tingling heat of about 5/10. The onions and carrots were fine enough shreds to be cooked through, the egg was hard-fried but with a little bit of soft yolk (I forgot to order my egg raw) and there were no green onions to be seen, a rarity these days. 

It wasn't perfect – the rice was sushi rice, so just a little bit al dente – and although there was a good amount of gravy, there was enough rice that it was all soaked up, so it didn't have that looser texture we prize. But the flavors were excellent, especially when I added the rest of the pickled cucumbers and remaining tako.

The udon noodle bowls were the choice for a number of diners, and they did look pretty good. We're inclined to give Nama another try, and see if we can find something that will please Carlos, our sushi purist. If we can get them to drizzle some teriyaki sauce over one of the rolls, that will make Inez happy as well! 

Three people, lunch: two starters, two rolls, one rice bowl, with tip was $71.