Actual sushi, in the form of an order of salmon nigiri ($5), comes with the wasabi already buttered on. The fish is beautifully cut and the rice is exceptionally good. Ohitashi ($5), a popular spinach side dish, is here tricked up with a rich sesame sauce and fine topping of shaved bonito, which looks like nothing but packs a lot of flavor.
Still hungry? One might fill up on onigiri ($4.50), a couple of slices of a warm rice log wrapped in taco-shaped pieces of toasted seaweed paper. You choose one or two from among four flavors: plum, salmon, bonito, and cod roe. The plum is pickled, and is somewhat odd by itself, but is effective as a flavoring for a lot of rice. Likewise the salmon.
One can also go for a seasonal nimono, a choice of market-price protein or tofu poached in a soy broth with seasonal vegetables. We opted for fish, and it was yellowtail (seasonal; recently $12.50), meltingly delicious with lotus root and fresh bamboo-shoot slices and baby bok choy.
Even more substantial is the nabeyaki udon ($9.50), a cast-iron kettle of salty broth full of big square noodles and assorted vegetables and protein. The coolest of the veggies was a thinly sliced mushroom cap, but I also dug Napa cabbage, baby bok choy, scallions, and such. The protein was topped off with a whole cherrystone clam (somewhat tough) and a poached egg. Scallops, two slices of fish sausage, and shrimp rounded out the kettle, and two pieces of shrimp tempura were served on the side. Normally you’d put the shrimp in the soup, too, but the frying at Shiki is so good that we ate them just as they were.
Shiki has unusual Japanese beers and an enormous list of sakes in many styles. A new beer for me is Koshihikari Echigo ($9.95/17 ounces). This is a lager that is mostly rice-based and served ice-cold. It’s very well made, but at the opposite end of the flavor spectrum from Sam Adams: only a whiff of hops and a hint of malt. It’s built for Japanese food.
The sakes are worth lingering over, but it’s easy to begin with a flight of four ($15). You get about an ounce each of three programmed sakes and your choice from the rest of the list. The programmed sakes are arranged by level of quality, which has to do with how much of the outer grain of short-grain rice has been milled off. Tasting sake is an exercise in subtlety, since these strong rice wines smell mostly of bare alcohol with just a little aromatic difference. My flight began with a basic Hitori Musume “Sayaka,” a clean sake without much character, maybe a touch of pear. Sato no Homare is a junmai ginjo (40 percent of the rice polished away, not fortified) and premium sake. The menu promised “pear, strawberry, grapes.” Surprisingly, it has quite a bit of pear, and a real increment in smoothness. I liked it.
Yonetsuru “Long Life” is a junmai daiginjo (50 percent of rice polished off) and ought to be lighter and more fragrant. No banana, no pear, no anise finish — nope, not for me. It tasted of just vodka and water. Perhaps the bottle was opened the day before, the bane of any wine by the glass. My pick instead was Yatsushika ($13/cup; $37/bottle), allegedly an earthy, milky traditional sake from northern Japan. I found it somewhat rougher in the plain-alcohol mode.
