Dinner at Sushi Seki (food, MomVisit09)

When my mom last visited three years ago, we went to Sushi of Gari. To try something along those lines, we went to Sushi Seki this past Wednesday even though we've already had sushi at Sushi Yasuda. Sushi Seki is like Sushi of Gari in that it's less about sushi and more about different combinations of sauces and (sometimes cooked) fish on sushi rice. The main problem we had here was that the rice paled in comparison to that at Yasuda. Otherwise, the flavors and textures were usually pretty good. I go to Seki by myself every now and again, and my favorites include the butter cooked whitefish, the snow crab, the spicy scallop roll, the salmon with cooked tomato, and the salmon with seaweed sauce. We also took pictures of some of our other favorites:

Chopped eel with avocado.

Tuna with tofu sauce.

Seared toro with a garlicky sauce.

Yellowtail with a jalapeno sauce.

Lightly seared tuna with an onion mixture and garlic chips.

And finally, the one piece that I really go to Seki for. I call this "the king of sushi" or the "triple decker". It contains a hot grilled kumamoto oyster on the bottom, a slice of toro above that with the garlic sauce, then a piece of somewhat chilled uni on top with the green basil sauce to finish it off. Between the different textures of oyster, melty toro, and creamy uni, the sharp temperature contrast of the hot oyster and the chilled uni, and the two different sauces on top, this single piece of sushi generates 3x2x2=12 different things going on in my mouth. This is the only piece I've had that rivals the hamachi with viet mignonette, thai basil, and shallots from O Ya in Boston. I don't know if they have a name for this piece, since I always special order it. One time I ate at a table and ordered it and the waitress drew a picture of it on her pad and asked me, "Does it look like this?" We ate a lot of food yet again, and the bill with t/t came to around $375.