February 17th 2012: Dinner at Basho Japanese Brasserie, Boston

Today after work, I had a meetup dinner at Basho Japanese Brasserie in Boston. I had a late night at work today, but I was still able to make my way there on time. This place is really quite posh, and I would definitely recommend this place to anyone, even without having trying the food yet.

The sushi bar

The benefit of being in a group of 8 was that we could try a lot of stuff without ordering too much per person. We started off with several appetizers, including the spicy ginger edamame, torched salmon salad, Shishito peppers, and Kobe Beef Spring rolls. Of all of them, only the spring rolls were a little disappointing, tasting really ordinary with dill that did not go well with the dish at all. The edamame was an interesting concept, just simply placing the bean pods in the sauce, and because one has to suck on the pod to get at the beans, taking in the sauce at the same time. I did not partake of the salmon salad, but according to my friends, the salmon lacked the smoky kick to make the salad perfect. I did try the Shishito peppers though, which were really good as well.

Spicy ginger edamame

Torched Salmon Salad

Shishito peppers

Kobe Beef Spring Rolls

After the appetizers, we then ordered our own individual dishes with me getting the Robata grilled spicy duck with mushrooms, the Crunchy Roll, and the Tropical Sunset Roll.

Robata grilled spicy duck with mushrooms

Crunchy Roll (Right) and Tropical Sunset Roll (Left)

The robata grilled dish was really small, but delicious, while the crunchy roll was a great experience with the fried onions in it giving it all the flavor and texture. The Tropical Sunset roll, which had strawberries, kiwi and cream cheese was an interesting concoction of flavors, although the taste of the cream cheese ended up  overpowering the other flavors.

As part of the trade agreement within the group, I also got to taste the Rock n' Roll Roll and the Yuzu Yellowtail roll, with the wasabi in the former being the overpowering flavor there, while the yellowtail roll was pretty decent too.

With that, after taking a while to finally settle the bill, I headed for home, having to go to work early tomorrow morning.