Life so rarely lives up to your expectations.
Location Info
Details
1487 South Pearl Street, 303-777-0826.
Hours: 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., 4:30-10:30
p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11:30 a.m.-2:30
p.m, 4:30 p.m.-midnight Friday; 4:30 p.m.-
midnight Saturday; 5-10:30 p.m. Sunday
Maguro sashimi: $4
Toro: $10
Amberjack: $7
Hagatsuo: $7
Negitoro: $6
Amaebi: $2.50
Sea
eel: $4.50
Kani: $2.25
Tekka
maki: $4.80
Yokawa: $10
Soft
shell tempura: $9.50
Shumai: $6
Miso cod: $13
Nikumaki: $8.50
Yakitori: $6
Lamb chops: $21
Duck breast: $18
Duck udon: $13
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The Big Three -- prom night, losing your virginity and your wedding day (which, in this ever-accelerating culture, can all happen in one 24-hour period if you really try hard) -- have become so built up in the modern mind, so fraught with unrealistic hopes, that they can't help but disappoint and go hilariously to pieces at the slightest provocation. Smart young artistic types should consider negotiating the sale of book/webcast/movie-of-the-week rights to these momentous events prior to their actually occurring, so that when they do inevitably end in tears, lawsuits and Shakespearean murder-suicide pacts, someone can benefit from the inherent theatricality of their failure.
We live in a world that, to borrow a cliche, is all sizzle and no steak. Even when we're talking about steak, there's no steak. Kobe beef? I've eaten my fair share of the fabled Japanese cows (along with the combined fair shares of just about everyone in Denver), and all I can say is that I'm glad it's been done on someone else's dime. At $1,200 a pound, Kobe beef should come with a hand job and a free T-shirt that says SUCKER in big, bold letters. I'll take Idaho grass-fed prime any day.
But while so few experiences live up to expectations, there's one thing that never fails to impress me, one thing that -- no matter how much it's talked about, no matter how often you hear it praised -- is always exponentially better than you could imagine. That thing is toro.
Tuna belly: the fatty, striated, dull-pink meat taken from the underside of that cattle of the sea, the giant tuna. Like eating velvet, like a taste of the divine -- there are no perfect words to describe your first taste of toro. And no matter how often you eat it, every time is like the first time. Toro never gets dull, never becomes old hat, and you can never eat too much of it. If there's a limit to the potential for enjoying tuna belly, I would have found it by now, and I haven't.
Of all the tuna belly available in Denver -- really, of all the tuna belly available anywhere in the United States -- the toro at Sushi Den is the best, the be-all and end-all of conspicuous consumption. Short of hopping a jumbo jet bound for Japan, you are not going to find better anywhere.
Why? Well, for starters, the knife artists working behind the long, segmented Sushi Den bar know their fish and understand that their role as sushi chef is to be the proud presenter of nature's most sublime bounty -- the final link in a chain of wonderful circumstance that has brought this food from the depths of the ocean to South Pearl Street in Denver, Colorado. Not just the toro, but everything they touch -- each of the thirty-odd varieties of fish available on any given night -- is shown the care, expertise and humility before beauty that's the hallmark of a great sushi chef.
Second, appreciative crowds -- massive, overwhelming, shoulder-to-shoulder, Armani-to-Manolo crowds -- pack this almost-twenty-year-old business on any day with a Y in it. During peak hours (those being any reasonable mealtimes, with an extra hour in each direction), there can be a two-hour wait for a table, and seating at the bar is just the luck of the draw. Big crowds mean a big turnover of product. A big turnover means no fish (not even the weird ones, like needlefish or raw octopus) will sit around in the cooler too long before it's fed into the bottomless pit of the dining public. And a lot of fish going out means there needs to be a huge amount coming in each day to restock those coolers. Which leads to the main reason that Sushi Den's toro is the best there is: the origin of the fish.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 sushi bars currently operate in the U.S. Most of them get their fish from seafood wholesalers who buy their fish from wherever they can get it, filling warehouses with all manner of frozen sea critters. A few of the 5,000 will occasionally import from Japanese middlemen working the hundreds of markets spread across the Land of the Rising Sun; a couple of spots will even get the odd order straight from the source. But Sushi Den is the only place getting regular orders -- daily orders, big daily orders -- from the center of the seafood universe. If you were to board a Tokyo-bound jetliner, settle into your seat and buckle in for a noon takeoff, right about the time the flight attendant was handing out the first round of peanuts, you would be passing, at 30,000 feet, the tuna that I would be eating in Denver that night.
After a year of working the kinks out of the system, Sushi Den chef/owner Toshi Kizaki now receives daily deliveries of fish directly from the Nagahama fish market in Fukuoka, Japan. Amberjack, wild yellowtail, Japanese mackerel and tuna -- giant bluefin, bonito, even baby bonito (yokawa on the menu here, so delicate and tender and full of the smoothest essence of tuna that it should be classified as a narcotic) -- all come winging across the ocean like modern magic. Toshi-san can land these fish because he has a man on the inside -- Koichi, his little brother -- who, in addition to running the new Sushi Den location on Kyushu Island, does battle at Nagahama early every morning, carrying tens of thousands of yen in his pockets (fish dealers run a cash-only business) and explicit orders to find the best, buy the best and get the best on a plane, quick. Twenty-four hours from market to the tarmac at Denver International Airport -- that's what Toshi shoots for, and that's faster by about 72 hours than anyone else.
