SAY NO TO SEIYO

A couple of weeks ago, Leah mentioned that one of her customer's brothers owned a Japanese restaurant in the South End, right across the street from Toro. I couldn't think of which restaurant this was, but after a breakfast at Mike's, I ran across the street and realized that the restaurant was Seiyo. I'd read about this place before, it's a sushi/wine bar. And peering into the windows, I noticed that it's a beautifully designed restaurant, with a wall made of empty wine bottles and just bar seating no tables.

So Leah and I decided to head over there and check it out. Given its location and the fact that they were serving sushi, I had expected the prices to be quite high, but I looked at their menu and prices online and realized that the prices were reasonable. When we arrived, the restaurant was basically deserted, which was surprising since Toro just across the street was packed and it was 7:30 in the South End. We were quickly seated at a bar, right in front of the window. Here's a pic of our view and the cool chopstick holder that I liked. You can also notice that the bar isn't straight, but in an angle.
And here's a pic of the interior of the space. that's the sushi bar on the left and at the back you'll see the wall of wine.
I decided to order a tofu salad and a vegetarian sushi dinner. Leah ordered the Sushi Regular dinner that came with 6 pieces of sushi and a tuna roll. She also ordered an extra spider roll. First we got our miso soup that came with the dinner...

Oddly enough, they served the soup with metal spoons. Which is almost never done at a Japanese restaurant. (uh oh) You're just supposed to pick up the bowl and drink it as is.

Here's my tofu salad. It was ok. As you can see it's just iceberg lettuce, so nothing special. And really, there wasn't a whole lot of tofu.

Ok, and here's the pic of my sushi dinner. There's an avocado roll, a cucumber roll and an aspargus roll.So as most of you guys know, there's a big difference between good sushi and bad sushi. This wasn't the worst sushi I'd ever had (That award would go to the premade sushi I once bought at a Costco in LA. We both came down with food poisoning. Never buy sushi from Costsco.) but we did agree that the sushi bordered on the passable/mediocre. It was quite disappointing given the beautiful setting.

Here's leah's spider rolland her sushi dinner.Even I could tell that the sushi wasn't well made, and I don't even eat raw fish. (it's a texture thing, i find it too chewy). The pieces of fish were very large and not cut well.

After hearing the waitress talking with the guys behind the sushi bar, I realized that they were speaking Chinese. And I'm not saying that people other than the Japanese can make good sushi, it's just that I've never had it. And the lack of a trained Japanese sushi chef really hurt this place. I mean, sushi is a pretty easy thing to make, you can do it at home, but doing something simple really well is always the hard thing. My advice to the owners of Seiyo is to hire a trained sushi chef, someone with a name, and get more people into your place. It's a shame to let such a beautiful restaurant go to waste.

We were hoping for some ice cream post dinner. Maybe some green tea or red bean ice cream. But the waitress just brought us our check, so I guess they don't serve dessert. We hopped over to Flour Bakery instead. It was just 2 blocks down and I had parked right in front of it.

Leah asked for a recommendation for the counter help and she suggested the brownie. I got this peanut butter oreo.I did like my oreo, but like Leah said, I don't know why Flour is such a popular place. Their desserts just really aren't they great. I can tell just by looking at them. That's why I didn't order the brownie, it looked a bit dry and certianly not chocolatey enough. And Leah ended up disliking it. I think we've given them too many chances. I much prefer the desserts at the Buttery on Shawmut.

So even though our dinner wasn't stellar, it was still great to hang out with Leah and just sit outside at Flour, watching all the double parked idiots in the South End scramble when the cops showed up and made them move their cars.