House of the rising sun
Shogun
ul. Migdalowa 12
Telephone 648-1919
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday:
Noon-10p.m.
Credit cards and reservations accepted
(in summer, you can request to dine in the garden)
Three weeks ago, I reviewed an Italian restaurant I stumbled on while scouring the nether regions of Zoliborz. This week I found myself in the back of a taxi hurtling toward Warsaw's southern reaches of Ursynow, in search of a Japanese restaurant called Shogun.
While Zoliborz was crowded with shops and trams and people running helter-skelter to get out of the rain, Ursynow was like visiting a giant version of Legoland. Our taxi navigated through a maze of tall housing blocks all built in standard gray concrete with not a soul to be seen.
Building a Japanese restaurant all the way out here seven years ago must have been a bit like opening a bikini shop in Siberia: I'm sure there wouldn't be much passing trade.
Not so, according to the owner. He said the idea was to attract a clientele that would come through word of mouth rather than just by opening a restaurant in a prime location.
"We have regular guests. This is a quiet place, not for accidental guests," she said.
Well, these accidental guests would like to say how good this place is. With a manicured Japanese garden out front and pink fairy lights giving the scene a rather bucolic glow, it was a veritable Eden amid the asphalt jungle.
The owners changed the look of the restaurant two years ago. Before, the interior was doused in traditional lacquer red. These days it's showing much better harmony with dark timber interior, potted bamboo, samurai swords on the wall and sliding screens that reveal another garden tableau out back. In one corner, there is a sushi bar, with tall stools for customers and red flags hanging from the ceiling.
Except for the Billy Bass singing fish sitting beside a glass bowl filled with his carp cousins, it all resembles a little slice of Kyoto.
This restaurant's speciality is yakiniku or Japanese grill. It's a similar theory to the Korean barbecue, where a grill is set in your table and you cook your own dinner from the comfort of your chair. But while Korean food can be overpowering with its heavy-handed use of garlic and all those spicy pickled kimchi vegetables, the yakiniku is just that little bit subtler. Compared to the Korean barbecue I've had in Warsaw, the meat served at Shogun almost melts in your mouth.
But to whet my appetite, I started my dinner with a bowl of the hearty-sounding shogun soup selected from the English menu. It was served in a rustic cast-iron bowl and was a spicy, warming concoction of shallots, cabbage and a few indistinguishable chunks of carnivorous matter that David seemed to enjoy much more than I.
From the sushi menu, we ordered the ebi (cooked prawns), sake (raw salmon) and a temaki, or hand-rolled California roll all made fresh for us by a bottle-blonde Japanese sushi chef.
The presentation was impeccable. The sushi was served individually, each on its own wooden tray with the sweetest, hottest pickled ginger that kicked like a mule, and a little pinched gem of wasabi. The rice was sweet and soft, the seafood fresh and tasty. Perfect.
For our main course, we decided to try the yakiniku that apparently only took off in Japan after World War II. The Shogun menu has a number of meat plates to choose from, including an all-you-can-eat barbecue option for zl. 95 a head. We chose three generously proportioned plates instead beef sirloin, chicken and vegetables.
As we sipped on our Kirin beers (which came with a free stick-on dragon tattoo), our attentive, English-speaking waiter came and fired up the gas barbecue that was hiding under a panel in the table. A quick slick of oil on the notebook-sized stainless-steel plate, and David and I were left to our own devices.
A Japanese couple at a nearby table had just finished their barbecue dinner without much fuss. I was hoping we would be able to do the same.
The steak had a light marbling of fat, which is important to help it cook and, like the chicken, it had been marinating in a special sauce that the owner tells me is the chef's very own special recipe. We placed a few of the thinly sliced strips of steak and chicken and a couple of vegetables garlic cloves, onion, sliced eggplant, peppers and carrots on the grill. Using the wrong end of our chopsticks (which I'm told is correct etiquette ... and a wise hygiene choice too) we poked and prodded at our meat just like you would do around your backyard barbie.
I told David that the secret is to not turn the cooking meat too often.
"Are you kidding," he replied. "A man has to turn it 150 times before it's ready."
Either way, both our cooking techniques worked, and after a minute or so we took the meat off the grill and tried it: bliss. If you like barbecued meat, you'll love Shogun. The meat is tender, tasty and freshly cooked. And that special sauce, a small dipping bowl of which sat on our table, is delectable.
"What's in it?" I asked the waiter, who looked very dapper in his black apron and bright red, double-breasted top.
"It's the chef's secret recipe that was passed down through the generations of his family. We call it magic sauce," he said.
Not long after this little exchange, things started to get a little bit out of control: With a table-top grill in a restaurant, hot plate maintenance is crucial. Leave that garlic clove on for just a moment too long, and it will turn in to a lump of charcoal capable of sending out smoke signals that can be seen in Bialystok. And whatever you do, don't let it drop under the grill because then you're finished. I speak from experience because that's what happened to us and soon our eyes were smarting from the smoke.
The waiter along with all the other customers in the restaurant noticed our dilemma and discretely gave us a clean hot plate for our next round of cooking. He also turned on some industrial-strength air-conditioning that made the place a little chilly, but thankfully, smoke-free.
Shogun serves all your favorite Japanese foods too tempura, dumplings, ramen, sashimi and if it is anywhere as good as the sushi and yakiniku we tasted, this place is worth the trek out to Ursynow. Or, if you can stand to wait, the owner is considering opening another Shogun restaurant in the city center.
What's more, compared to some of Warsaw's other Japanese restaurants, the prices weren't too outrageous.
Dinner for two, including drinks, came to zl. 260 ($64.20).
On the menu:
Shogun soup zl. 22
Ebi sushi zl. 23
Sake sushi zl. 20
Beef Sirloin yakiniku zl. 28
Chicken yakiniku zl. 32
Vegetable yakiniku zl. 22
