Flavor Boulevard

Is it miso season? (Miso has a season?) Berkeley Bowl puts out about 10 different kinds of miso in their “international” aisle, and Nojo advertises a seasonal 5-course miso omakase menu on Black Board Eats. Usually the Black Board Eats emails go straight into the trash, which I kinda feel bad about because I signed up for their newsletter after all, but thank goodness I did read it that morning. That night I got the code, called my friend, and we went to Nojo.

We were seated at the counter, but not the one facing the chefs, that would have been nice, this was a small counter facing the wall near the door. The wall looks pretty cool but we felt kinda weird at first, what with the other customers crowding the tables and here the three of us facing a wall next to a middle-aged man. We felt outcast. But Nojo doesn’t take reservation for party under 6, only a phone call an hour before you arrive to put your name on the waiting list, guess I should have called more than an hour earlier, what was I thinking following the rules? But the servers, inked and all, are really nice, the water was clear and sweet, the sunflowers smelled good, and the middle-aged man left minutes after we sat down.

And the food.

Cucumber salad with shichimi and nori. Shichimi is a chili pepper mix with (supposedly) 6 other spices, but they sprinkled just enough to give the cold thing a kick, not spicy. There’s more shichimi on the counter for the duller tongues people who like spicy food.

Miso Omakase Course 1: a simple salad of Little Gem lettuce and cauliflower with shiromiso (white miso) dressing. The pickled red onion was the real little gem.

Miso Omakase Course 2: miso soup with oyster mushroom and butternut squash. Hearty. San Francisco gets cold at night, so this helps.

Fried eggplant with akamiso (red miso) and peanut sauce, topped with julienned leek. Eggplants have never been my favorite fruit and will never be even if I go vegan, but this miso eggplant was better than the grilled pork jowl and the garlic-barley miso butter chicken (Miso Omakase Course 3), both of which tip-toed on the salty side.

Tempura tree oyster mushroom, squash blossom and lemon, to be dipped in a zesty ponzu mayonnaise.

We didn’t expect a fried thing when we ordered the rice balls with tare and nori, but the surprise was welcome.

If I was skeptical about anything in the Miso Omakase menu, it was the shiromiso-glazed trout. But its sweet creamy sauce blew my doubt away, the rice ball was great for sweeping up every last drop.

Miso Omakase Course 5: buckwheat & beer crepe, a drizzle of ginger-muscovado syrup, blueberry compote on top and shiromiso ice cream. We thought muscovado was a cross between muscat the grape and avocado (weird, I know, but possible, right?), but we asked, it’s a brown sugar.

And of course, kurogoma (black sesame) ice cream with roasted strawberries on a bed of “peanut thunder crackers”, which is like peanut brittle and caramel popcorn intertwined, multiplied the goodness by 85.

You know how people can just tell that something’s good when they see it, for no reason at all? That’s how it was with Nojo for me. Every izakaya in the Bay has the same kind of yakitori on the stick, the same expensive price, the same raves on Yelp, and I don’t know why I wanted to go to Nojo, but now I’m recommending it to everyone I talk to. Was it the kikubari exuding from the friendly staff, inked and all and warmly smiling as they strode between tables? Was it the simple but flawless food? But I didn’t know any of that before I came.

Somewhere in me, I just knew. Miso is in.

Address: Nojo (which means “farm” in Japanese)
231 Franklin St.
San Francisco, CA
(415) 896-4587

Dinner for three: $99.82

Back then we used to take a break from Fortran coding, cross the street from the old Physics building to McDonald’s to refuel at midnight. Now having moved up the ladder, we have little unpretentious Chinese and Japanese down the block, though certainly they don’t open 24/7. A vegetable tempura is much lighter and less savory than a chicken nugget, but many of them would do. The batter is a mere coat for earthy cuts of sweet potato, squash, onion rings, and broccoli. The flavor does not go beyond steam pockets eagerly exploding and crumbled flakes scattering like confetti. Like sushi, Japanese tempura standing alone sans sauce is food for the eye, not quite the taste buds.

The same thing holds for beef teriyaki. Dark red grilled complexion topped with sesame seeds beautifully masks a rather dry and sinewy texture. The clear, thin dipping sauce needs some more ingredients to balance its salty lonesomeness. If you order teriyaki at Anzu, don’t expect the commercialized, Americanized, sauce-logged beef and chicken teriyaki in a Subway sandwich, it’s simply not the same.

The katsudon saved the day. Short for tonkatsu donburi (deep fried pork cutlet rice bowl), the concoction has the sweetness of egg-coated onions, the tenderness of breaded lean pork, the moist of gooey white rice. Each spoon was filling and satisfactory. Maybe I’ll eat this again before my next exam.

The trophy of Simplest Delicacy that day must belong to a tie among the miso soup (I suppose this is shiromiso (white miso)?), the edamame (boiled green soybeans in the pod), and the red beans which I have searched everywhere to no avail (but to find this colorful assessment on pickles in Secrets of the City). A miso soup this simple is more or less a salty version of herbal tea, you warm your hands with it, you gulp it down, no spoon, no vegetable, no meat, no chewing, just tiny white dusts of fermented legume forming vortices and clouds in a translucent dashi (vegetable and seafood stock). Then you squeezed a firm, crunchy soybean out of the pod, preferably with teeth and tongue, to taste a hint of salt on the fuzzy case. The red beans with their complimentary sweetness and a very, very quiet pickling sensation were just pure joy. We found these at Berkel Berkel too, any idea what they’re called?

Update: Anzu revisited

Anzu (in Berkeley, not to be confused with Anzu in San Francisco)
Dinner for 2: $24.58
Address:
2433 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-843-9236