Sushi and Lockouts

Last night, we enjoyed a restaurant we had never visited, Sushi Zushi. It's a place with decidedly modern Japanese design, a place that oozes 'chic' from every corner. Its menu is phenomenol...page after page after page of traditional and Asian fusion offerings, all of which sounded wonderful. We ate there at the suggestion of our friends from out of town, who had been to the place some months ago during another business trip to Dallas. It's in a part of Dallas that prides itself on being chic and trendy...not our style, normally, but worth a try from time to time. We fell in love with the place, though its pricing assumed patrons of more means than my wife and I, or patrons on unlimited spending accounts and with a need to impress clients, friends, bosses, etc.

The waiter was aggressively energetic and opinionated about what we should eat. Since our friends were picking up the tab and seemed not to worry about cost, we readily agreed to let him, and our dining partners, pick out the meal. The meal started with arguments over which cold saki is better, a dry saki or what the waiter called a cloudy saki, which he said was a bit sweeter but was what all the Japanese guests drink. My wife and I both said we generally preferred white wine, but have rather sparse experience with, or knowledge of, saki. The guy finally brought samples, which convinced us that "sweet" was the wrong word and that it was, indeed, the more appealing. So we got a bottle of saki, which I believe I overheard was $57. My wife and I would order such a thing on the tenth anniversary of our winning a multimillion dollar jackpot...certainly not on a typical night out with friends.

We started with edamame because we wanted to be able to say we had eaten our vegetables. I love the salty flavor of soy beans that have just been broken from their hulls. From there, we had a wonderfully spicy mix of crawfish, two or three kinds of caviar, rice, ginger, wasabi, and lots of other stuff I did not recognize. The waiter brought a beautiful dish to us, then proceeded to mix the ingredients into what looked very much like pre-digested dogfood...but it tasted delicious, nonetheless. We had extremely finely-sliced razor clams in a lime based dressing, topped with a very fine slice of jalapeno. We had yellowtail, we had very, very spicy ahi tuna encrusted in pepper....we had lots more. It was fabulous.

Then, we took them back to the Melrose Hotel, where they were staying, and split a bottle of red wine with them. The Melrose bar, called the Library, is a very attractive place. The entertainment last night, a lovely singer-pianist, was good, but very, very loud for our tastes. All in all, a restaurant, a bar, an area of town worth visiting again.

Today, my world reverted to its normal self, but it wasn't too bad. I helped my Aussie assistant try to get her car unlocked, after she mistakenly shut the door with the radio blaring. Finally, a had-been repo-wrecker driver, coupled with a couple of Hispanic guys who just happened to have a very professional looking jimmy bar in their car, got the door unlocked...but just as I said, "you got it" to the tatooed has-been and I pulled up on my coat-hanger, the passenger side door that I had been working on unlocked. The thanks, though, were deserved by the blue-collar dudes who were willing to help a white-collar geezer and his beautiful, tall, blonde foreign-accented assistant.

When I got home today, a major water main under the street in front of my house was gushing water...it still is. I called the City of Dallas at 5:55 pm, finally got a human at 6:00 pm and reported it. I expect the City will send someone next Thursday. I'm not skeptical.