Lazing by a driftwood fire in cool sand on the beach on a summer night, the briny tang of an onshore breeze mixed with the perfume of the crackling wood. That’s what nodoguro—black throat sea perch—tastes like.
The fish is flash-scorched with a butane torch, a technique called iro-aburi in the sushi business; it’s heated until just before the flesh colors. The fish has a thin layer of fat just below the skin. Torching it with just a pass softens the fat. It adds enormously to the taste. These are methods rarely seen in the majority of sushi places.
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The last time we ate nodoguro was at a mom-and-pop sushi-ya in a quiet neighborhood in Tokyo, while the Yomiuri Giants’ game played on a TV over the bar. So when we saw nodoguro on the omakase menu at Nippon Tei, one of 17 courses, we assumed it might be a case of mistaken identity. Given the extraordinary lineup of the other courses, we should have known better. The omakase dinner at Nippon Tei may be the premier sushi dining experience in St. Louis at this time.
Mounted when the West County restaurant is otherwise closed, the dinners are a relatively new feature, one of many fashioned in what was, for many years, a fairly ordinary and predictable Japanese-style eatery. Nick Bognar—the owner’s son, who has a degree from a local culinary school and considerable exposure to some excellent kitchens, especially Austin’s Uchiko—has brought new life and terrific energy to the space.
Nippon Tei’s strip mall location is stylish, cool, with a growing reputation for inventive preparations and special events like the one that we recently attended. It’s a multi-course excursion, one steered entirely by the chef’s sense of creative direction, fortified with his acquisition of ingredients—some truly amazing ones, unique to our area—that guide palates into places they’ve likely never visited.
An important note upfront: St. Louis is not Tokyo. In terms of the conventions of omakase dining, comparisons are difficult. It’s unrealistic, pretentious, and even annoying to expect an omakase meal in Ballwin to meet the standards of one in Kichijoji.
In a typical sushi-ya in Japan, omakase is less meal than it is an ongoing relationship. Interaction between the appetite of the customer and the work of the chef progresses over time. As tastes are both broadened and refined, the chef pushes open culinary windows to new vistas, all the while mindful of the predilections of his customer, building on what he likes and what will intrigue and educate him further.
Tonight, some of the customers—regulars at Nippon Tei—know Bognar. This is not, however, an ongoing omakase tango. It’s a one-off, a performance for a fortunate audience of nine. He explains as much when we begin, lets us know he’s going to be riffing here. And he’s working in concert with a partner he’s brought in from Texas, Yoni Lang. (Lang learned his craft from a sushi master who required him to “pay tuition,” which translated to working for free every day for a year.)
Kappa monster (pictured above) is Lang’s first course. The tiny bowl is mounded with a hill of spaghetti strands of cucumber (kappa), tangled with yuzu citrus slivers and tossed with a soy sauce vinaigrette and basil oil. But it’s the addition of yukari—a lemony, piquant condiment with notes of mint—that prickles the taste buds and adds just the right notes. What could have been a simple starter is instead a delicious heads-up: The restrained addition of the yukari is a sign that this is going to be a different experience.
Again and again, these minor touches display the chef’s affinity with traditional Japanese ingredients, often with a flair for individual expression. Kosho, for instance, is a flavoring normally made of dried, ground yuzu peel and Japanese peppers. Bognar replaces the latter with Thai chilies; the difference is a fiery uptick on the spice level, and it works splendidly atop a fillet of yellowtail (pictured above).
Oboro kombu (pictured above) is usually associated by sushi enthusiasts with mackerel. It’s “white kombu,” the heart of the flat, fleshy slabs of seaweed, dried, redolent with a savory smack and is pressed into a cake along with the rice and mackerel. Here, though, Lang employs a refinement of the seaweed: It’s shredded into a bramble called tororo, dried and crackly and cupped into a nest for sweet cubes of flounder. Tororo is the most fragrant version of prepared kombu. Connoisseurs always inhale its aroma as it comes up to the mouth; it’s a noseful of the sea that exquisitely complements the fish.
Nearly leaf-thin slices of itoyori-dai threadfin bream appear (pictured above). It’s past their best-tasting season, but who cares? This is a fish almost certainly not to be found in the cases of other area sushi restaurants—or in many places anywhere in the country.
It isn’t just that these are exotic—every fish is treated individually by Bognar and Lang. The bream is sliced correctly, razor thin; a thicker cut would compromise the fragile taste, which lives on the muddy bottom of seas off southern Japan and can taste like river catfish if the meat is too thick.
The shima-aji striped jack (pictured above) was allowed to sit a few days, Bognar noted. This is exactly the right way to treat the fish, a close relative of the mackerel. Fresh-caught, its flavor is bland, undeveloped. Aged madai, a sea bream (pictured below), was cured in citrus-based leche de tigre, and served below threads of radish, with mint leaves and dill oil.
Bognar also employs some advanced tricks in the sushi trade. Yubiki is a kind of scalding in hot water, a technique that draws excess moisture from the flesh, tightening it, which concentrates taste and makes the texture more appealing. (It works beautifully except for a shimmering bite goma saba—mackerel. The fatty, oily fish is at its flavor peak this time of year. The scalding knocks back the intensity; we have a feeling that the chef’s done it to reduce the fishy kick, which can be overwhelming to some palates.)
There is more than enough to dazzle the sushi aficionado. Some courses, though, veer into Asian-inspired directions that are just as rewarding. A small puck of lamb tartare (pictured above), chopped and splattered with a pungent laab sauce of Thai chilies and a scatter of pine nuts, explodes with flavor. This is a classic northeastern Thai preparation, in which Laotian influences dominate the cuisine. It’s exquisite.
Lang gets into the spirit of the evening with a signature dish, a shrimp étouffée spooned over rice and wrapped with nori (pictured above), the seaweed still crispy as diners bite into the concoction, adding texture as that étouffée does its work on the palate.
The unquestionable high point of the dinner, aside from the fish offerings: a chicken wing (pictured above), the end deboned and stuffed with chicken fat and shrimp and deep-fried. No other chicken wing will quite measure up.
We watched Bognar craft sushi a year ago, and his workmanship was fine. This night, he’s improved considerably, his movements more assured, well-paced. This is a matter of dosa in the vocabulary of the Japanese chef. “Comportment” might be the best translation. Bognar’s dosa, his “presence,” is more polished now. Even so, he moves too much. (He would still do well to spend some time watching Noboru Kidera at Nobu’s and Mr. Sunaoshi at Oishi Sushi on Ballas Road, two of the region’s most underrated chefs, to study the economy of motion that both display. A good sushi chef appears as if he needs to take no more than a couple of steps in any direction, as if his tools and ingredients are so artfully arranged he needs nothing beyond a smooth reach. True, since this meal includes lots of non-sushi courses that require trips to the kitchen, some of this is excusable.)
Lang, the sushi chef at Uchiko, at is no slouch at this either. Both men draw their knives through fish, slicing them with their elbows close to their sides, moving efficiently from the hips. Western chefs use their shoulders, and while this may seem inconsequential, it’s evidence that these guys trained with some reliably expert sources and have the sense to learn both technique and the heart of things.
Some guests have arrived with their own wine, a waste. Pairing wine with sushi vandalizes both. The place for wine at a sushi dinner is precisely that of bruschetta at a Szechuan hotpot; forcing one into a cuisine where it is an obvious stranger is awkward. Their palates would thank them if they’d bring a frosty six-pack.
Those guests—and this was the most noticeable departure from omakase meals in Japan—do not follow the same behavior that you’ll see in a high-end Japanese sushi restaurant. Conversations at those meals inevitably center on the ingredients, their provenance; the chef explains in detail the hows and whys of the preparations. Here, it’s different; guests tend to chat among themselves and other than exclamations about the food, they comment little and ask less. It’s not necessarily a worse way to experience omakase, but it is different.
The pacing of the meal is measured. Bognar is obviously intent on demonstrating the often-subtle distinctions between various species of snapper; three outstanding examples have been featured (golden eye snapper pictured above). Yet the succession of courses has also been arranged, like a grand fireworks display, to detonate features in carefully timed sequences.
After a succession of fish, a brick of wagyu beef suddenly appears (pictured above), held up by the chef like the trophy that it is. It’s so outrageously veined with luxurious fat, it looks like a chunk of marble. Once again, the blowtorch does its job. Just a few passes, and the buttery meat is rendered perfectly browned and tops nuggets of vinegared rice. The results is dazzling, sumptuous.
A complex risotto (pictured above)—glossy with brown butter, stippled with tender slices of trumpet mushroom and tinged with a dashi broth of shiitake—is spiced with chili oil, a belly-filling finish. It’s followed by a moldy dessert.
Amazake (pictured above) is flavored with a mushroom-like fungus (koji), which is also the enzyme used to kickstart rice into turning into sake. You could call koji a spore, though that doesn’t make it sound more appetizing. Nonetheless, it tastes like a lemony yeasty bite of sourdough bread dough, and it’s been used in Japanese cooking for centuries. Lang has used it, combining it with a miso-inflected chocolate creameaux and a swirl of lemon oil, to create a kind of smooth pudding, just sweet enough to qualify it as a dessert. There is not a better way things could have ended.
It’s impossible to pick a best course here. One, though, exemplified the evening: the gizzard shad (pictured above), called that not because it’s related to the American shad but because it looks like that fish. In Japanese, it’s konoshiro and known as kohada in sushi eateries. It’s fairly common in Japan’s sushi-ya, quite rare here.
What’s challenging for the sushi chef, what makes kohada a standard by which he can be judged, is the simple fish’s preparation. The fillets are salted, allowing the inner skin to dissolve, concentrating the fish’s oil. Then it’s marinated in rice vinegar. The tough part is knowing how long to leave the salted fish to maximize the taste, and it’s a process that varies considerably, given the size of the fish and the humidity. It’s a test of skill. What Bognar put on our plate was a minor masterpiece.
Given the affluent age that we live in and the comparative vibrancy of the St. Louis dining scene, novel eating adventures are available, and many are worthwhile. Few, however, can match the quality, the connoisseurship of this one.
Dave Lowry, SLM’s lead restaurant critic since 1993, has also written The Connoisseur’s Guide to Sushi: Everything You Need to Know About Sushi Varieties and Accompaniments, Etiquette and Dining Tips and More.
