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.
Desserts are not really a Japanese tradition, although Shiki lists several. We had a very elegant piece of raspberry mousse cake ($5), mango sorbet with a strong flavor of ripe mango ($5), and green-tea ice cream with adzuki bean sauce. The latter, like the flight of sakes, is an exercise in dry-on-dry. They do have espresso and decaf espresso.
Shiki is tiny and hard to find, but filled by 7:30 on a weeknight. The crowd runs to Japanese families and mixed couples. I don’t know if its success is because there was a niche for traditional Japanese snacks that wasn’t being filled, or if a pendulum that swung far into sushi is now starting to swing back toward sukiyaki and tempura. Certainly you could eat nothing but the fried food here and it would be memorable.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.
