Taka

A couple weeks ago, J and I headed to Taka for dinner with M&N. We have often discussed doing the omakase, a chef's tasting menu, and decided to get it.

Unfortunately, I was too enraptured to capture all the courses or any photographs but here's what I can recall:

We started off with the healthy body soup with an oxtail base and I'm sure lots of vegetables and herbs. It was certainly meatier (and spicier) than the healthy soups of my childhood. Though I have an affinity for those "blander" versions of healthy soups from when I was little, this was very good, comforting, and warming all at once.

Another course was a ceviche, which I have seen on the menu and always wanted to try. The menu's ceviche is specific to one fish, salmon, I think, but this was a mixture of different seafoods. Delicious.

There was a kai carpaccio which, like its konpachi cousin I enjoyed only when I mixed all the different tastes on the plate for one bite.

A soy-sauce-braised pork belly was a delicious but surprising light course. The sections of meat were thick, sandwiched between the fatty goodness of the belly fat. You can always tell when you are getting good quality pork belly and this was it.

There was a fried shrimp dish that I hardly remember. It came with a honey-mustard-style dipping sauce. This was by far the least favorite of all the dishes, but it was interesting, to say the least.

There was a tasty tuna tartare, heavy on the sesame oil and top with little crescents of avocado.

I know that I'm missing dishes because we had about nine total, but I'm in a hurry to get to the end.

Certainly the dish that stood out in my mind was the last course: what we think was the oh-toro nigiri. The toro itself was cut into small pieces, the equivalent of a mince, I suppose. It was so delicious.

We ordered oh-toro handrolls to finish out the night. That was a perfect and delectable ending.