James T.
Google
American diners are spoiled.
There, I said it. We're spoiled.
We have too much to pick from - too much variety when it comes to eating out. Especially when it comes to Asian eateries.
What's wrong with a Chinese place serving just Chinese dishes? Better yet, what's wrong with a Chinese restaurant specializing in just one or even two dishes? In today's Americanized food marketplace, restauranteurs have decided that they no longer want to identify as just one cuisine, because Americans like variety (and we're spoiled! There! I said it again!)
As a result, your local Korean BBQ now also has to serve Vietnamese dishes, and the village Chinese restaurant must now serve Thai, and when it comes to Japanese - oh boy - the restaurant must serve a little bit of every dish that the Nipponese culture has to offer. Restaurants in Asia tend to focus on a handful of items that they specialize in and perfect; and nobody does it better than Japan.
When you go to a sushi restaurant in Japan, you don't expect to find Chicken Teriyaki, Yakitori, Katsudon, or heaven forbid, Ramen, on the same menu. It just doesn't happen that way.
Pick a specialty, master it, serve your customers and repeat. That's how it's done. If done otherwise, menu items become mediocre, boring and lacking. That's why so many Asian restaurants are just... well, boring. It's not that the food quality is bad, or the ingredients themselves are good - it's that they aren't utilized to achieve their fullest potential.
In some instances, It takes an apprentice chef YEARS to master both a dish and the skills required to prepare it. That is why apprenticeships are so crucially important in restaurant culture in Asia. After all, you don't throw a bunch of ingredients into a pot of boiling water and call it soup... well, maybe some people do, but there is a SCIENCE to making GREAT soup!
Anyway, I've gone a kilter off topic - but there is reason for it!
Dozo Dozo suffers from this 'Culinarsus Americanitus' - they have too many things on their menu! Specifically, too many specialty items followed by too many mediocre things.
This restaurant screams, literally SCREAMS, Japanese Omakase.
Hardcore. Japanese. Omakase.
It is painfully clear that the establishment wants so desperately to just serve sushi - and I'll tell you what - the sushi here is F*CKING AWESOME. The fish is aged beautifully, cut perfectly, served precisely chilled, and seasoned magnificently. The accompaniment ingredients are all top notch and selected expertly. Even the soy sauce on the table has been specially selected to add that slight extra saltiness should you want it, but it's not really necessary because it's already perfectly seasoned. And speaking of perfectly seasoned... the sushi rice. HALLELUJAH! It's SEASONED PROPERLY!!!
Those of you who've followed my reviews know how much a stickler I am about seasoned rice. And those who know, know. It's the RICE that makes the sushi, well, sushi.
If this place JUST SERVED SUSHI, I would tell you that this place would be impossible to get a table at.
Here's where it goes wrong - the other dishes are just... meh.
The presentation is beautiful (despite my Ramen being served with the spoon submerged in the soup. Tsk tsk - 10 points taken from Griffyndor). But the cooking quality is 'blah'. My dining partner (okay, FINE, my mother) ordered the Beef Teriyaki. It looked beautiful, but the seasoning was flat, and the beef was tough; overcooked.
My order of Ramen had a chance to really shine, but it, too, was weakly seasoned. That is not to say that it wasn't flavorful - the tonkatsu bone broth had a nice flavor, but the salt seasoning and 'fatness' of the broth were lacking. The ingredients - i.e., the toppings - were just nonchalantly placed on top, and it was missing the Naruto (fish cake, not Shinobu ninja from the Hidden Leaf Village). And, not to nit-pick, but to nit-pick, the noodles were overboiled.
Service was great. The interior, beautiful. I will go back, but just for the amazing sushi.