Shunji's Lunch Special

Greta article. I love fermented food. Growing up, sauerkraut and pickles were considered a vegetable in our house. Btw, I’ve had some great success with the fermentation lids you recommended. I will report soon.

Yes. You can still find it in Shiga Prefecture

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Regarding the wider varieties of white fish on the specials board (and thus sushi omakase), an insider’s explanation or theory would be that Shunji orders what they call fish boxes from the distributor/supplier. I’m pretty sure this was mentioned before either here or somewhere on that “other food board”.

It’s like the fruits of the month club subscription seasonal package, except the recipient likely doesn’t know the contents. The chances of getting shiromi/white fleshed fish are higher, sometimes there are other goodies inside. It’s somewhat cost effective on both ends (wholesaler/distributor and restaurants).

Yeah, that may have been nice. I feel like a lot of my pieces had the exact same sauce, though. That didn’t help things.

This is fairly typical for higher end traditional joints - soy sauce (nikiri), ponzu (rarely), salt, sweetened soy sauce (“nitsume” for eel), wasabi.

For more elaborate sauce combinations best to visit places like Go’s Mart, Nobu, Koi, Hamasaku, Katsuya etc. or your favorite neighborhood sushi bar.

sushi of gari mgiht also be a good bet…

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Why? The sushi menu is the same at lunch and dinner.

Because Sergio is cooking dinner.

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I make sure sergio is in when i go for lunch.

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Not everyone else knows to go to Sergio. Sergio is more present for dinner than at lunch.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I think shunji’s nigiri is good, not great. Where he really shines is his dinner omakase with all the cooked seasonal dishes. My god I’ve had some amazing bites of food there.

I just had Shunji’s lunch special, very similar to Jeet Kune Bao’s. It was good, but the “wow” factor wasn’t quite there for me. However, alongside the special, I was able to enjoy broiled “Ayu”, a fresh water fish available in japan only in the summer. It was prepared similarly to Saba or Sanma, but much sweeter. The waiter also showed me a video on his ipad on how to eat it.
For dessert, Lime ice cream with fresh mulberries, a berry I’ve never had before. It was like a very sweet blackberry, sweeter than just about any other berry I’ve had.

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Ayu is tasty fresh off the heat! I’m guessing with Shunji’s standards, that was as good an Ayu as one can get here.

Mulberries are just as you describe. They’re becoming more available but still prescious.

saw some fresh ayu at raku over the weekend, but they were pretty big, i like mine baby-sized.

125 is very expensive for me to

Sergio does not sound like Japanese name.

Sergio means ‘smoked marlin’ in the original Japanese

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Yeah, smaller but roe is a plus. I know you love dem babies.

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So, is Shunji lunch a go or not. Everyone’s comments are all over the place. It’s like a Jonathan Gold review; I can’t figure out if you all like it or not.

I had my first meal at Shunji’s for lunch about a week ago. In terms of technical execution it was definitely exceptional, even though I was being served by an assistant chef. As others have noted elsewhere on the board there’s a lot of similarities in flavor profiles with all the whitefish but it’s still all very good, and that just makes the other stuff stand out even more. The ikura was easily the best I’ve ever had, with an amazing pop and excellent marinade. The nigiri was very small though, to the point where to it took concerted effort to draw out the flavor of the fish as I was eating it - not sure if that’s an intended consequence or if the size is for other technical reasons.

The premium lunch special is miso soup + 12 pc + blue crab hand roll, which is not really enough for food me (or, I would think, most people), especially given the nigiri size, so I added on another hand roll (ume-shiso - amazing - they make their own ume paste in house, it seems, and it’s so much better than the store-bought stuff…) and an order of Tamago (which was also very, very good). Base price is $47, seaweed miso soup rather than tofu is a $2 upgrade (iirc), another hand roll + tamago was another $9.50 - all of this sounds reasonable on its face but it adds up pretty fast. After tip and tax it came out to $76. The problem with a straight price comparison is that very few other high-end places even serve lunch; what do we have, Tsujita? They have a variety of chirashi offerings, which is not really comparable, and also their own lunch omakase (15 pc + stuff) for $80 base (pre-tax/tip), which works out to be considerably more per-piece - though maybe the nigiri there is bigger; as I haven’t actually had straight sushi there I can’t say.

All I can say is that if you ignore the price, it’s very unlikely you’ll be unhappy with the actual food.

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