Open for a bit over half a year, I’ve been there three times now and figured should do a review. It is located on King Street slotted between TCBY and Sushi King and the Post Office. Same location that has seen other small Japanese restaurants. It is an authentically Japanese style izakaya, they have a few other locations in Japan, so the staff is most comfortable with Japanese, although there is at least one who speaks perfect English. And as such, you’ll notice a large percentage of Japanese expats in the customer base. And it’s izakaya style is casual and intimate, many of the regulars and natives will call out orders direct to the counter. I would say the food is contemporary Japanese with a strong Okinawan bent. You’ll find a good amount of Okinawa standards like goya, rafute, soki soba, taco rice and an array of awamori drinks.
In case you don’t know, taco rice is not a misspelling of tako, it’s an Okinawa thing. Imagine a taco, like a Taco Bell taco, that had it’s tortilla disintegrated and instead ended up on a bed of white rice. Naru’s take on it is served ishiyaki style, a heated stone bowl that makes that wonderful burnt koge layer of rice. And the rice is a bit more like mexican rice style, with the spices and flavorings in the rice, as opposed to the bits on plain white rice that some might call more “traditional”, if one could call the mishmash of pop cuisine that is attributed to GI influence such a thing. I found this rendition to be quite tasty. There are still bits of lettuce in it that become all wilty, but I enjoyed it.
This first trip we sampled goya, renkon natto, salmon sashimi, eggplant, and the gyoza “lasagna”. They were all excellent, prepared with care and with excellent ingredients.
Follow up visits proved the same. A tako-watercress salad, salmon sashimi, saba, a champuru, something I’ve forgotten what, and gyoza pizza. Gyoza pizza this time is a deconstructed gyoza laid out pizza style, instead of the lasgna which was conventional gyoza layered with cheese.
And finally our most recent visit. A goya sunomono (vinegared), shime saba (vinegared), mushroom tomato salad, peanut “tofu”, and okinawa sobas. Again, all good. The shime saba was especially sublime, very lightly vinegared, finished with a sear with torch at table, we had wished we had gotten a full order! The peanut “tofu” was interesting, we learned that it was made from peanut and then starch was used as the solidifying agent, so wasn’t a whole lot like tofu. The Okinawa soba was great, and actually lighter than what I might have expected from something using pork, I hade the soki soba, Dave the rafute.
Ah yes, lest I forget, the piece de resistance? I think perhaps this would be the piece to resist, but I couldn’t. The desert of natto iceream. No, it is not using natto as a term for just bean, as I have had and love whats called amanatto, which is candied beans. Yes, it really is natto, a generous scooping of fermented soybeans on top of vanilla icecream. Yes, I ate it all, and actually didn’t find it offending. I also didn’t think it was the greatest thing ever and probably wouldn’t order it again.
Anyway, Naru is proving to be quite happiness inducing for us, except perhaps in one respect, you will leave with your wallet significantly lighter. A few more hits of the various infused awamori and you won’t care. I have to say Naru gets 4 out of 4 happy monkeys. Oh yeah, tell us what their sign looks like to you?
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