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Hours: Lunch: Mon.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sunday noon-3 p.m. Dinner: Nightly 5 p.m.- 2 a.m. Screened rooms make for quiet conversations.
Good Choices: Amaebi (sweet shrimp sushi); suzuki (striped bass sushi); caterpillar maki (eel with avocado); assorted sashimi and sushi plates; hitsu mabushi (broiled eel); mentaiko ae (spicy codfish roe with squid); deluxe seafood tempura.
Prices: Sushi $3-$9; appetizers $4-$14.50; soups, salads $2-$6; entrees $16-$40 (chef's selection of sushi, sashimi); lunch specials $8-$13.50; desserts $4-$5
Credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diner's.
Access: Fully accessible.
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FUGAKYU
1280 Beacon St.
Brookline
(617) 734-1268
Restaurant reviewed 04/08/99 by Alison Arnett
America is a crazy-quilt place and restaurants show that pattern boldly. Fugakyu is a Japanese sushi restaurant owned by Chinatown restaurateurs, an ethnic place that embodies much sleeker design than might be expected under that umbrella, a place only several months old that has been discovered by a neighborhood best known for its kosher butcheries and bagel shops.
For good reason, too. The seafood at Fugakyu is exceptional. Owners Edward and Maria Leung are part of the Leung clan that owns a fish wholesaling company as well as several Chinatown restaurants. They know fish.
Americans might compartmentalize Asian cuisines, thinking Japanese eat sushi and Chinese their own dishes. But the love of sushi and sashimi, of the clean taste of the sea on vinegared rice or the sweet blush of miso on broiled eel, is becoming universal. Edward Leung loves sushi - in fact, he serves lobster, shrimp, and other seafood as sashimi in East Ocean City on Beech Street in Chinatown - so he opened his own sushi palace.
Fugakyu is all shining woods, private screened booths, a big circular sushi bar with little wooden serving boats revolving in a stream, an overhead video screen that shows soothing scenes of Japan, and bathrooms as elaborately outfitted as any elite hostelery. There's quite a good wine list, well-matched to the food. For service, the owners seem to have hired three times the number of seaters, greeters, and servers of any other place in the area. In a fairly quiet restaurant, the loudest sounds are often of young women staff members rushing to and fro in stylishly chunky heels.
But it's in the delicate concoctions from the sushi bar that Fugakyu shines. Maguro tataki, thin slices of tuna just barely warmed, are arranged in a shallow bowl and floated in a ponzu sauce with a hint of sweet, a hint of salt. Offsetting that are radish sprouts, bright-hot on the tongue, and sprinkles of sesame. Another of delicate, snowy white fluke sashimi is just as beautiful, just as fresh.
Amaebi, sweet tiny shrimp, barely glints off the tongue, just a wisp of flavor. Toro, tuna belly, is as rich and velvety as butter. And the striped bass sushi is a revelation, making one wonder how just one cut of fish can have such depth.
The booths, especially the screened ones in the back that involve much ceremonial opening and closing, are fun and offer a lot of privacy; still, sitting around the sushi bar tops that. It's not as intimate as some of the smaller places where talking to the sushi chefs is encouraged - there's too much distance and even on a weeknight, the five need all their concentration to keep up with the chopping and shaping demanded. Still it's great fun to watch them and even more delightful to watch the platters, the big sushi boats, the separate dishes being prepared, topped off with just another curl of pickled ginger, just another sprinkle of sesame seeds as the waiters pick up the orders.
"What's that?" "Next time, we have to order that," we find ourselves saying, our mouths full of crunchy spider maki. This soft shell crab maki, tempuraed and then fashioned into a spikey, ungainly roll, is messy to eat and irresistible as a lobster roll.
The skill of the sushi chefs, led by Jack Huang, really shines in the sushi and sashimi selections. One night we enjoy sashimi: glowing red maguro (tuna), broiled eel, salmon, frilly slices of egg omelette, slightly chewy surf clams, all over a bed of vinegared rice. Another evening we try a nigiri selection, each curl of raw or cooked seafood over its own mold of rice: salmon, tuna and tuna belly, pearls of salmon roe wrapped in seaweed and four maki of yellow tail with scallion.
Japanese food isn't all about sushi, as seductive as the selections might be. Fugakyu's deluxe tempura - shrimp, scallops, eel, and fish fillets breaded and puffed into airy and fantastical shapes - is good. A large portion of salmon fillet is broiled with a little salt and served with very plain steamed carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli. Besides the restorative miso soups with tiny cubes of soft tofu, a mushroom broth with a few fat matsutake mushrooms and tender stalks of enoki is a gentle breath of woodsiness. In another appetizer, cubes of barely fried tofu and chunks of soft eggplant float in a slightly spicy broth.
A few meat dishes are less appealing, possibly as much a state of mind, in such a plentitude of seafood, as a criticism. Thin slices of sirloin steak wrapped around asparagus are chewy and without much flavor. Roast duck in a spicy sauce is fork-tender and quite good, but the sauce veers decidedly toward Chinese flavors with a hoisin sauce base, we thought, and the vegetables with it look woefully naked. As we sample it, we look longingly at a pretty painted wooden box of hitsu mabushi (broiled eel glazed in a sweet sauce) being carried by, and audibly sigh. The eel here is delicious, I say, mentally noting to order that and the very spicy codfish roe with squid the next time I come.
What we definitely won't have again is the ginger ice cream, an odd dark color with only a faint taste of ginger. The waitress insists that's what it is when we inquire, leaving us to puzzle over it. We are only tepidly interested in another dessert, a doughy fried ice cream ball filled with mango sorbet.
A friend once told me about a business associate who would order three or four entrees and then for dessert order another of the one he liked the best. Next time, at Fugakyu, I'll just call for another round of sashimi.
Tips & hits
