A clean, well-lighted place
By : Franny Berry
Nippon-Kan has a quality overwhelmingly absent from last week's victim, Va Banque: logic. From the food to the conveyor belt, this newish Japanese/Chinese restaurant makes almost perfect, translucent sense.
The conveyor belt set-up apparently big in London (so it must be a good idea) allows you to sit along a bar and pluck out plates of sushi, sashimi and salads as they move past beneath a plexiglass dome. For those of the infamous "I don't know much but I know what I like" persuasion, there is a small illustrated guide to most of what whizzes by. The cost of each dish depends on the color of the plate's borders; a red bordered plate will set you back zl. 10, a riotously multi-colored one, zl. 20, etc. In one of Nippon-Kan's many examples of rationality, the color codes are prominently displayed on every wall for easy reference.
As it was the first time I'd ventured out to a restaurant since reading about kitchen crews having bodily fluid tossing matches and snorting their way through New York chef's Anthony Bourdain's memoirs, the paranoid part of my brain was relieved to see we could watch the ultra-hygenic, unbloodied chef construct our sushi in front of us.
So I sat back and enjoyed the following:
Cocktail/wine list: Beer is limited to draft Zywiec and Asahi Dry, a Japanese brand. Wine comes in several varieties of red and white, ranging from zl. 120-zl. 200, with both a red and white available by the glass. There's also a plum wine and one brand of saki. If Nippon-Kan wanted to move up from wonderful to stratospheric, they could offer three or four brands with some short tasting notes. Yeah, I know, dream on.
Culinary high point: The sushi. Tender, moist, flavorful. Comes with ginger and heaps of my favorite legal drug, wasabi, on raised wooden trays. Particularly amazing was the fatty tuna (maguro toro); the fried, batter-coated shrimp rolled in seaweed and rice (ebi tempura maki); and my personal favorite, the ikura maki: salmon roe heaped on the requisite sticky rice and wrapped in seaweed. Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. If I didn't know Nippon-Kan's seafood had been frozen at some point, I would've assumed Warsaw was a seaside town.
Culinary low point: Dessert. No green tea ice cream, and poor substitutes in the shape of lychee in syrup and steamed shrimp dumplings. The fruit, which the innocent bystander described as a cross between eyeballs and testicles, was canned and over-sweet, while the dumplings were oily, tasteless, and stuffed with mystery meat as well as baby shrimp. Avoid.
Prices: On par with those charged by other Japanese restaurants in Warsaw. Dinner for two with beer, saki and tea came to zl. 229 ($51).
Service: Nice but tentative. The waitress forgot to clear off our dirty dishes something you tend to notice when sitting at a bar and don't have much space to maneuver in and wandered away sometime around the time the bill was due.
Atmosphere: Inspires confidence a clean, spare, bright and comfortable Western interpretation of a Japanese cafeteria. The restaurant escapes the cavernousness that usually goes with this kind of aesthetic because of the conveyor belt/bar setup, which breaks up the room, and the low bar seats, which restrict your view to the colorful tidbits revolving in front of you and your dining partner. As you would expect, Nippon-Kan is a serious-food place rather than a people-watching one, and Monday night's contingent was not exotic enough to make me regret the lack of a vantage point. The closest Nippon-Kan comes to an aesthetic miss-step is the bilingual menu, which comes in a brown, imitation-leather Naugahyde cover and lists items in an uninspiring font on white, plastic covered pages. Yucky to look at and yucky to the touch. The visual tackiness is compounded by a front page injunction: "If you come after 22:00 or over 6 person's group you should pay 10% tip!" Oh, please.
When to go: As often as your credit card balance permits.#
