There’s a lot to like at Basho

June 30, 2010|Devra First, Globe Staff

We’re trying to order a dish called “Japanese Premium Plum Chazuke.’’ It’s on the menu, but the waitress really doesn’t want to let us have it. Tall and blond, in a sleek room decorated in stark white and spring green, she looks like a model from a modern planet. Japanese soul food is not in her vernacular — particularly not chazuke, the homiest of dishes. But when made right, this soupy rice in broth with plum and tiny round crackers has tremendous powers. It can soothe and revive the eater simultaneously.

She frowns, earnest. “I don’t think you will like it,’’ she says. “Someone ordered it and said it was really not good.’’ Get the scallop kiwi roll, she entreats. Try the crispy shrimp; it’s really popular. She is only trying to steer us clear of the shoals of gustatory unhappiness, which are desolate shoals indeed.

Basho Japanese Brasserie — a welcome addition to the Fenway — specializes in a contemporary take on the kind of food served at izakaya, or Japanese gastropubs. The stylish restaurant even goes to the trouble of offering robatayaki — skewers of meat, fish, and vegetables grilled over charcoal, relatively rare in this country. Even so, it is likely that many who come here will ignore the bulk of the menu, because in the US, Japanese food by and large still means sushi. Clearly, it does even for some of the people who work here.

Basho, opened in April (the name means “place’’), is owned by Jack Huang, who also operates Douzo in Back Bay. The kinship is clear. Both feature clean-lined decor, with sushi bar as central focal point. Basho is immense — large glass doors lead to 7,500 square feet of dark, angular furniture, white-on-white geometric patterns, and a sort of light show/screen saver of floating chopstick shapes projected over the sushi bar.

Both restaurants also feature rosters of designer rolls named for creatures that bite, sting, or crawl: alligator, scorpion, spider, tiger. This is a deadly menagerie.

We wrest the chazuke out of the waitress, and as promised, it is terrible. The crackers are stale, there’s no plum flavor, and the rice is too hard. But the ever-popular rolls are quite good.

There’s a house-named Basho roll, fried crab, lettuce, shiitake, asparagus, pickles, and jalapeno aioli, rolled in a sheath of cucumber and soy paper rather than seaweed. There’s a yuzu yellowtail roll, wherein a sauce made from the distinctive Japanese citrus yuzu complements seared fish, roe, avocado, cucumber, and spicy mayonnaise. There’s a crunchy roll, made so by the inclusion of fried onion and sharp, tiny crumbs; playing against their texture are cucumber, tuna, salmon, several kinds of roe, and a mango sauce offputting in its sweetness.