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Marvelous Maki, Mediocre Wine
Monday Sep 26, 2005.
By Zinny Fandel
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Steamer is finally back from a summer spent drinking in Michigan (among other things). I spent a fair amount of time boozing there myself, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a night where we BYOBed (unless drinking wine in a meadow with homemade pizza counts). After four months of hocking over way too much cash for bloody marys, rum punch and bottles of bad wine from the small-town grocery, we're back in Chicago with a wine-filled vengence. We decided to try Sushi X, looking to beef up our list of places where we can go crazy on fish and leave with a full belly and light bill. I'm pretty unadventurous when it comes to sushi and wine pairings: Sauvignon Blanc is just too crisp and good to substitute with anything far outside its family. I'm also pretty poor, so cheap-cheap-cheap was the name of the game. Trader Joe's fits the bill in these cases, so I swung by on Sunday morning and picked up a $5.75 bottle of 2004 Indaba Sauvignon Blanc, rationalizing it tastier in my mind because of its South African origin (if it was American Sauvignon Blanc, it'd be at least $8, right?). Sushi X sits a literal 50 steps west of the Chicago Blue Line. Though it's billed as a delivery joint, there are still plenty of tables for eating in. However, the best-eaten-at-home vibe does have some interesting effects: A phone with a ridiculously ear-scratching ring sounds off regularly; there's no visible sushi bar, and no nigiri or sashimi is served; and the decor, which Steamer dubbed "repressed," is a little half-hearted. There's projected anime (nice) and a beautiful tray ceiling, but the overly hip triangular tables make eating a little tight and awkward, and a second area separated by gauzy curtains feels like a bad blue afterthought. That said, maki lovers will delight in the maki-only menu. Wine lovers should be the go-with-the-flow type: We drank out of juice glasses and weren't offered an ice bucket for our bottle, which we popped while waiting for our cups of miso. The miso, strongly flavored with salt, was delicious. The wine? Not so much. Steamer pronounced it cheap white after sipping it. Which it obviously is. But cheap wines can trawl the "wow" and "whoa, nelly" line, and this skirted its way toward the latter. It didn't have that tangy grapefruit punch that I love in Sauvignon Blancs, and, oddly enough, had an almost oaky, Chardonnay-like finish. But heaven knows we aren't too picky, so we drank up while sampling some tasty rolls. We went with the Yellow Jacket, a sweet, light layering of hamachi, shitake, avocado, wasabi mayo and paper-thin mango; the Honey, a rich mix of white tuna and cucumber, with huge dollops of honey mayo and tempura crunches on the outside; and the tempura-shrimp-based Godzilla roll. All eight-piece orders were tasty, but my favorite was a concoction of our own: the menu lists a good 30 items you can add to the roll for 50 cents to $2. We took a basic yellowtail and added avocado, green onion, cilantro and jalapeno. Scrumptious. We finished with a three-piece order of vanilla and red bean mochi, mainly to bump our order up to the $50 mark: In addition to thrifty BYOB dining, we go even thriftier with gift certificates from Restaurant.com. I bought a $25 gift certificate to Sushi X for $4 during a sale on the Web site. The final tally: a bottle of wine, plenty of miso and maki, dessert and that dull tax and tip for $44. Not bad for two on the town.
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