Scott Sweetow
Google
Always looking for new places to try out for dinner, and heard good things about OAC MI Kitchen. They specialize in small plates, and have a wide variety of Asian inspired dishes, particularly with a Korean flair. Basically, you can either order everything at once, or just keep a steady flow of small plates coming.
My friend and I particularly liked the MI cucumber, which was marinated in a spicy soy dressing, with delicious crunchy cucumbers. Another real winner was the crispy spicy tuna, which was fairly standard good spicy tuna, but with these really amazing rectangular rice cakes covered with a crispy arare. The hamachi (yellow tail tuna) crudo was very tasty as well, with excellent fresh fish, and even some saffron threads on top for fun. The nori oil with the hamachi was a new one for me, and wasn’t a favorite, because I don’t think it really added a lot to the dish, but overall, I would definitely get this dish again as well. Our server Makayla, who did a really excellent job, recommended the popcorn shrimp, which had chunks of black cherry, more of the tiny arare crackers and crispy almond slices. The popcorn shrimp dish was glazed with the current Asian culinary darling flavor - Yuzu. It also included some pieces of mint, which gave the dish a nice color, but the mint was too overpowering in my view, given the delicate Yuzu flavored sauce and cherries. The only dish we would not order again was the wok tossed cauliflower, which had an almond based sesame seed sauce. About half the pieces of cauliflower had a strong truffle oil flavor, which definitely clashed with other things, and truffle oil was not listed as one of the ingredients. We told our server about this, and she mentioned some other people were not happy with the cauliflower as well. Not sure where the truffle flavoring came from, as it was not consistent throughout all the pieces of cauliflower. Makayla was kind enough to take it off our tab though, which was awesome. If you are in Franklin and like Asian influenced cuisine, you need to give this place a try. One funky and fun piece of background entertainment was the replaying of 70s and 80s commercials on two large TVs, which was a blast from the past!