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Company Xmas party tonight. We went to Matsuri, the Japanese restaurant in the Maritime Hotel. From the NY Times:



"Youthful and exuberant, and stylish as all get-out, it pulls off the neat trick of presenting both traditional and modernized Japanese food in a warehouse-size basement that feels as much like a club as it does a restaurant.

The visuals are impressive. Huge paper lanterns, crazily squashed and lopsided, hang from a vaulted ceiling lined with dark wooden ribs. The walls are faced with lustrous jade-green ceramic tiles. The floor is dark polished wood. Over the brightly illuminated sushi bar, where chefs work at top speed throughout the night, a mysterious pattern behind frosted glass turns out to be a series of identical sake bottles, their labels neatly aligned and facing outward. The waiters wear uniforms emblazoned with the bull's-eye design normally seen at the bottom of a sake glass, another sly reference to the restaurant's mind-boggling list of nearly 200 sakes.

Into this operatic setting steps Tadashi Ono, no stranger to the idea of cuisine as theater. Formerly the chef at La Caravelle, he created a serene temple of avant-garde Japanese cuisine at Sono, where he made not only the food but the plates and bowls as well. The mission at the high-energy Matsuri is different. Most of the menu is dedicated to perfectly traditional sushi and sashimi, with fairly standard hand rolls added on. Matsuri offers nearly 30 species of fish, with a couple of less commonly encountered selections, shad and pink snapper. On a Manhattan scale of sushi excellence, I would put Matsuri in the upper third for quality and freshness, with a special commendation for the sweet egg custard sushi."

Lots of sake flowed all evening, it was fun.