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2020-06-30
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Summary: It’s a harsh rating for a new restaurant, but you don't get a grace period when you charge the prices Sumiya does. Apart from terrific service and a beautiful and smartly designed interior, it’s hard to recommend it. They stretch themselves too thin and end up messing up the basics. They have a chance to be great though: the unagi itself was the best kabayaki I've had in HK. A mid/high range specialty unagi restaurant in HK would be a smash; this hodgepodge izakaya/eel restaurant is abs
Sumiya, boasting fresh eel flown in from Japan, is part of the Zagin group, which includes the restaurants on Gough Street, Zagin Soba (meh) and Marude Sankaku (fantastic), among others. Their specialty is obviously eel, with an emphasis on kabayaki style (with tare). The head chef is from Kyoto, but we neglected to ask where he worked before.
Here’s the gorgeous exterior and interior. I love the modern Japanese look and how they placed the bar by the street. Most tables get a look inside the kitchen, and even in this tiny space, they manage to fit a lot of seating. They replaced the truly terrible Tiger Room, and even without discussing the food, Sumiya is, aesthetically, a big upgrade to Gough St. I enjoyed the service – shout out to Stanley in particular, who had a strong grasp of the menu, and was very friendly in answering our questions about the restaurant and the food. He even moved us to a kitchen-facing table when it became available. No issues there.
Here’s the menu:
As you can see, it’s quite varied for such a small restaurant – $800 eel sets along with yakitori and izakaya appetizers. I’m not sure what they were going for, but small restaurants should focus on a limited menu built around the specialty of the shop, i.e. EEL. It’s almost like “there’s already a charcoal grill, why not include yakitori too?” Logical I suppose, but they obviously require different timings and techniques, leave different residues on the grill, need different seasoning etc etc. It’s a tiny restaurant - why spread yourself so thin? We could see the results of this in how many people were running around in the kitchen, but of course, the food is the ultimate proof. Unfortunately…
To get a good feel of what they were capable of, we ordered the Unagi Kappo set and an Unagi-don, along with an eel-cucumber appetizer.
Unagi Kappo Set
So, I was assuming, based on the description, that it would be 6 different eel dishes, prepared in various methods e.g. simmered, grilled, pickled etc. I’ve had eel-based sets like this before (admittedly in Japan), so I thought this wasn’t a crazy assumption. Amazingly though, for 800$, there are only two tiny pieces of kabayaki; and the kicker – they weren’t even good. Insufficiently grilled and left too long to cool, they were a bit chewy and not just a bit fishy. Unreal.
The rest of the set was unimpressive too – the tempura was the best dish by far, terrific thin batter, freshly fried and interestingly-filled. The simmered pork belly and mushroom was cold, overcooked and boring, and the pickled egg rolls were an unpleasant combination of bitter, sour, and under-seasoned. The duck was overpowered by English mustard, and again, cold.
The saving grace of this set was sadly the humble udon dish, which had a wonderful umami-filled dashi broth, though my friend thought the udon itself was too soft
Also, this chawanmushi. A comment I’m surprised to have to make – the joy of chawanmushi is the subtle flavour of steamed egg with the broth from chunks of chicken and texture of gingko, mushroom or fishcake. What isn’t joyful is this pool of unagi tare (which in this setting is VERY sweet) steamrolling all the mild ingredients it it has submerged. For me, a perfectly steamed, cloying and unpleasant mess (we did finish the eel)Unagi Don
I’m conflicted on this – after my first bite of eel I told my friend that it made up for the disastrous eel in the kappo set. It was the perfect combination of charcoal, tare, crunchy skin and bouncy eel. Tare isn’t easy to get right, and unagi shops guard their recipe fiercely. Usually some combination of mirin, sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, sake and dashi (eel or fish), the best sauces complement sweetness with savoriness, imparting depth and more concentrated umami/ocean flavor to the eel. I think Sumiya’s tare is darn good, and I never got bored of it, even with as generous a portion of eel as the unagi-don provides. There’s no way to describe a perfectly grilled piece of eel; the perfect crispness of the skin in combination with the silky flesh, brought together by excellent tare. Obviously the best part of the meal, and the best in town for me.But then I tried my first bite of rice and it all fell apart; not literally, quite the opposite in fact. I’m pretty sure most people are like me: a big part of eating Japanese eel is the joy of good tare and well-cooked Japanese rice. A lot of places serve pretty mediocre eel, but most places can’t mess up rice and sweet sauce. Sadly, this place reverses the equation; I mean, look at this rice:
There are a lot of weird things going on here. First, the rice grains were fragmented a la Vietnamese broken rice, which I’d never seen in Japanese rice. 2nd, it’s unusual for tare to be completely mixed with the rice; in unagi-don the rice is usually coated with only the extra sauce from the eel. 3rd, there’s no way around it, they cooked this rice in too much water. Japanese rice is forgiving with extra water though, so reaching this level of gloppiness requires some serious heavy-handedness. I suppose then it’s a combination of all three: too much liquid (water and tare) into small, broken rice grains results in soggy, sticky rice. Considering there are only two things you need to get right in unagi-don, this is frankly unforgivable. No matter how good the eel is (and it was very good), it’s like bad rice (shari) in sushi – it just can’t happen. I’ll assume they fix the ratio of water:rice eventually, but it’s still overkill to fully mix the rice with so much tare. I’m also not sure why they use broken rice mixed with regular rice, as it inevitably results in messy non-uniform texture and saturation; very un-Japanese indeed.
Eel-cucumber salad
This was great – slightly sour cucumbers and savory eel, not weighed down by any tare. It’s a small victory, but a great dish with sake or shochuOverall though, I can’t, at the moment, recommend Sumiya at all. The poorly-executed and thus horribly expensive $800 kappo set and the glopfest rice in the unagi don are evidence of a restaurant that hasn’t figured out what it wants to be. The kappo set points to finer-dining aspirations, but the flavors and execution (why was everything cold?) did not work. On the flip side, that they couldn’t get the rice correct in a RICE BOWL shows their attention is overly divided, or that they haven’t been able to taste and perfect the fundamentals. A Japanese-run restaurant that messes up rice is… unfathomable. As I’m sure someone has said before; rather than drain the ocean, better to clean your own pond first.
HK doesn’t have a great unagi place; Sumiya has the fundamentals to become one. The unagi in the unagi-don proves they have what it takes if they only have to worry about grilling eel. I just hope they figure out that out, instead of trying to compete in the jungle of HK izakayas (which by the way, don’t mess up rice).
张贴
