Actual Restaurant Review

"Most sushi joints don't offer timbale of toro tartare, glazed with avocado sauce and decorated with a cucumber-and-radish cockade like some petit four out of Escoffier. But Grace and Jack Lamb, who on their first date both confessed to dreams of owning a restaurant, aren't interested in restraint. "I wanted bamboo and elegant, sexy lighting," he says. "I wanted it to feel luxurious and warm, like a jewel box," she says. Eighteen months ago, they opened their tiny Japanese grotto on the site of a former video shop on East Fifth Srreet.

"We're here every night," Mr. Lamb, formerly of Bouley and Danube, says. "It's our baby." The couple hired the Japanese architect Hiromi Tsuruta, who painted the concrete outer wall the color of morels and cut it with a low srrip of glass. Inside the cool hideaway, a curving tunnel of bamboo rods casts a green, watery light over the room, and gray velvet banquettes hug the walls.

Mr. Lamb, an Irish-Italian-American in a dark suit and designer frames, and Mrs. Lamb, a KoreanAmerican in sleeveless silks, move among the parrons. As she stops to explain a special or he stoops to pour a bit of ume shu (rice vodka flavored with Yamaguchi plums), his hand grazes her forearm, her hand brushes his shoulder.

In the back of the restaurant at the sushi bar, chef Masato Shirnizu sculpts fish into still-lifes: an amusebouche of wild surf clams, lightly poached, arrives on a bed of chrysanthemum petals. Tasmanian salmon sashimi, pin-striped with fine yellow lines, appears on a ceramic palette. Strips of belt fish lie on a julienne of daikon radish that tastes of hearts of palm. The Lambs' pleasure shows all over the menu, but nowhere more than in their playful selection of sakes-from the ladylike Cherry Blossom Water and the Very Gentle Genshu to the Devil's Quivering Tongue, which, it turns out, tastes like ouzo. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for dinner. Sushi a la carte $3-$12; enttees $24-$100.)"

From a New Yorker Magazine.

Gag me with a spoon!