Audio By Carbonatix
Life so rarely lives up to your expectations.
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.
So when I step into Sushi Den for a late-night Saturday happy hour and slide into the only empty chair at the sushi bar, I know that the side of bonito being broken down by the big Mexican sushi chef with the long, gleaming knife arrived in the house not long before I did. It’s possible that this fish was swimming just yesterday (more likely, it was caught by the tuna fleet a few days before and flash-frozen, hitting the market floor at Nagahama as a fish-sicle at -55 degrees, but, hey, it’s not a perfect world) and now is headed straight for my tummy.
“I want that,” I say to the kid working the station in front of me. He’s already rolled me a half-dozen kinds of fish while I watched his partner work the bonito — from squishy, raw shrimp amaebi and sweet crab kani tied onto its ball of rice by a thin ribbon of black nori, to simple, delicious tekka maki wrapped in gleaming black seaweed, toro cut on a bias from a solid slab whose price I can’t even guess at, and a negitoro sushi ice-cream cone with a fistful of rice packed into a twist of nori and topped with a ball of spicy yellowtail paste. As the sushi chef pulls pin bones with a little pair of silver pliers, I point to the bonito and say, “That right there, please.”
I wait a few minutes, drink my green tea, poke at the amuse set before me — slices of cucumber marinating in a sesame soy sauce — and watch the action behind the bar. There are at least three languages being spoken — Japanese, English and Spanish — and despite the hour, the pace hasn’t slowed a bit. The recently expanded dining room, with its industrial-chic exposed brick and open ductwork (perfect for the space and the neighborhood and the mobs of moneyed fishheads), is still loaded with late-night sushi eaters and the cream of Denver’s foodie elite, some of them so hip I’m surprised they can see over their own pockets. The seats at the bar fill the minute they turn. A small army of servers works the floor, every one of them sporting the glassy-eyed high of terminal adrenaline overload from another busy Saturday night with another fully committed book. They shout orders back and forth over my head; they arrange and pick up plates. I scrape my chopsticks against each other in anticipation.
Finally, my maguro sashimi arrives. It’s amazing — rosy red and meltingly soft and almost sweet with freshness. By the pound, a good bonito will sell at market for up to $10,000, and a buyer is paying for every ounce — for the skin and bones as well as the best back and belly meat. I’d watched as the chef trimmed down this side, throwing away probably as much as he kept. The tough hide, the silverskin, the bones, the sloping back near the tail where the meat is thin and slightly darker in flavor, the gray fat that collects between the skin and muscle. What was left was a solid log of loin about as long as my forearm and as big around as my fist, from which he cut absolutely beautiful, absolutely perfect tuna meat, then laid it across a hand-rolled ball of sticky sushi rice dimly accented with rice vinegar. That was it, and it was marvelous — a sublime communion with the purest, freshest of flavors.
Although there’s no reason to ever eat anything other than this perfect sushi, Sushi Den’s wide-ranging menu offers everything from lamb chops and duck breast marinated in plum wine to bento-box lunches and pointless vegetarian sushi options. On an earlier visit, I’d found the yakitori — mystery chunks of chicken and green onions skewered and slathered in teriyaki sauce — as sticky and grill-charred and good as any I’ve tried elsewhere. The huge shumai dumplings were stuffed with pork paste and a tasty grab-bag of seafood (shrimp always, sometimes squid, sometimes mussels). The miso-marinated black cod was fantastic, coming to the table flash-seared so that the sweet marinade had gone black and caramelized along the edges of the single, curling piece of fish. The roast-duck udon with enoki mushrooms was fine, but then, I have a soft spot for the tiny white bouquets of fungi called, in English, Velvet Shank (which, coincidentally, would be my name if I were a lounge singer — Jason “The Velvet Shank” Sheehan).
But I’d also ordered some limp tempura udon, as well as truly awful tempura soft-shells slathered in a blueberry-ponzu sauce that tasted like deep-fried steel-belted truck tires, and nikumaki (asparagus wrapped in Steak-Umms, more or less, then hit with a shot of teriyaki sauce) that would’ve been right at home at any of those 4,999 other sushi bars that don’t take the kind of care with their fish that Sushi Den does.
Although those dishes didn’t live up to my expectations, the sushi bar here never disappoints. Because nothing can approach the incredible, indescribable pleasure of tasting something — a slip of toro, a piece of maguro, a soy-glazed wedge of sea eel, or one of a dozen pieces of amberjack kanpachi arranged on a plate facing off against an equal number of hagatsuo bonito caught off the coast of Japan just a day or so before, still radiating life — that you know is the best, the freshest, you will ever have.
Until your next visit, anyway. Because no matter when you come, the fish will be here waiting for you. Like eating toro, eating at the Sushi Den is an experience that always delivers.
