ART DIRECTION + PHOTO STYLING Taste the RainbowA ongoing series celebrating & documenting colorful, vibrant produce from the farmers market #tastetherainbow Summer 2014 Northwest Travel SeriesPhotos taken while exploring Oregon, Washington and the Wild Coast & Vancouver in BC, Canada. Food PhotographyMisc food photography, including some of my faves: tacos, ice cream & sushi. You know, to balance out all those veggies. Handmade LifestyleAn assortment of colorful & creative lifestyle photos featuring mail art, handmade gifts,  flowers, and my messy desk. Spring 2016 Northwest Travel Series In progress! Follow along on Instagram @kmarshello!Moshi Moshi: An instant favorite My expectations were set high for Moshi Moshi (yet another) sushi bar on Ballard Avenue’s busy block of boutiques and bars.  Needless to say, Moshi Moshi delivered on its promise of traditional Japanese cuisine mixed in with Pacific Northwest-inspired creations. 

If you’re planning on visiting, don’t bother looking for a sign outside – it doesn’t exist, at least not yet.  Instead, look for the diffuse, cool glow of the restaurant’s imposing metal and LED cherry blossom tree, a central feature of the restaurant’s design.  At its base, a wrap-around bar (sushi on one side, drinks on the other) welcomes walk-ins.  The constant dance of sushi chefs and bartenders moving between their ingredients and eager customers stirs up a constant swirl energy that permeates the atmosphere.  This place is definitely buzzing. With good reason, too.  Although sushi is their staple, the formidable page of starters and small bites simply cannot be overlooked.  My personal favorite was a grilled oyster with spicy miso cream ($2/each, pictured top left).  Also impressive was their selection of shioyaki: salt grilled fish and meat.  I tried the waygu beef loin with soy salt ($14.50, pictured middle left), which was just the type of pungent flavorful dish I had been hoping to find.

Moshi Moshi’s fish selection is extremely fresh, and as diverse as its menu.  I could only identify about 60% of the fish in my Omakase (chef’s discretion, prices vary, pictured top right), and I consider myself to be a bit of a sushi snob. An unfortunate disappointment was a lack of creativity in Moshi Moshi’s “new style” maki sushi rolls.  I’m a fan of the type of inventive interpretation you’ll see at places like Mashiko and Umi Sake House, and I had high hopes for clever suprises at Moshi Moshi.  sushi zushi menu domainWith the exception of a self-titled roll, the rest were predictable and even a bit pedestrian, especially when compared to the diversity found elsewhere on the menu.jiro dreams of sushi albuquerque All told, I believe Moshi Moshi has a bright future in Ballard.  jiro dreams of sushi barnes and noble

I look forward to eating my way through the rest of their menu, and perhaps claiming a new happy hour hangout.  $4 maki and $1 edamame?  Sushi chef Akiyoshi Saito's dishes at Cutting Board include the Shizuoka roll (left), omakase nigiri (rear), and omakase sashimi. Proof of Seattle’s embrace of sushi is not just in the number but in the variety of restaurants that serve it. In Seattle people eat sushi in traditional, old-school places (Maneki), high-end boutique’y places (Chiso), elegant neighborhood joints (Kisaku), family-friendly emporiums (I Love Sushi), buffets (Blue Fin), holes in the wall (Musashi), hipster hangouts (Umi, Ohana and Wasabi Bistro in Belltown), conveyer-belt or kaiten sushi feed lots (Genki and Blue C), eco-conscious concerns (Mashiko), and at least a few other categories I am probably forgetting.umi sushi menu jacksonville oregon The California roll, that original American sushi invention, is sold in QFC, Sea-Tac airport, and Safeco Field. umi sushi menu manhattan ks

Seattle is one of a handful of cities with a significant Japanese-American heritage, which used to be a meaningful indicator of the quality and amount of sushi served in a town. But that distinction hardly matters anymore, the food is so ubiquitous. Most of the sushi joints in New York are run by Central American, Korean, and Chinese immigrants, and also serve Thai and Korean food to draw a larger audience. Sushi is no longer a Japanese-American thing, if it ever was. ichiban sushi menu winchester vaAbout 35 years ago, when sushi was a rare delicacy in America, Japanese chefs in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo started making sushi and adapted it for Americans, mostly by constructing increasingly elaborate rolls to please diners. And for the most part, that’s still how sushi works in the U.S. Among the types of sushi eateries in Seattle (150 are listed in Yelp alone), few if any are like Cutting Board, chef Akiyoshi Saito’s relatively new place on South Airport Way.

It is, generally speaking, a dive (a label some are logically uncomfortable with when it comes to raw meat), in that it’s simply adorned, relatively small, and inauspiciously located on a busy, industrial street. Cutting Board does not fit neatly into any existing category of sushi restaurant. It is not an old, established place. It is not a chic, happy-hour destination. It is not a neighborhood hangout since, with all due respect, this part of Georgetown isn’t really a neighborhood yet. Employees from the area frequent the place for lunch, but the density of employment is not such that the restaurant qualifies as a businessman’s hangout. Cutting Board is not home to any particular scene like the nearby Stellar Pizza or The Corson Building, that fanciful Shangri-La, swingers club of food, only a few hundred feet and around the corner from Cutting Board. Saito, the former chef at Wasabi Bistro, chose the location mostly because he could not afford to set up shop in a more gentrified neighborhood, and rent in Georgetown is still relatively cheap.

He took a space that once housed the Kurry King restaurant, next to a tattoo parlor. Georgetown is still speckled with dubious-looking motels and dominated by light industry, companies that make or distribute measuring instruments, fasteners, garden statuary, compressed gases, and construction equipment. The urban landscape in Georgetown looks incongruous and untamed and seems to discriminate against nothing, no matter how seedy or how fancy. At Cutting Board sushi is the main draw, but Saito also serves bento, curry, and yakisoba. Customers line up to order at the counter before seating themselves and menus are written in English and Japanese. Utensils, napkins, plastic cups, and a water dispenser are also part of the self-serve format. Saito, however, will bring your order to you, served on elegant, Japanese dinnerware. The food, upon first sight, departs from its fast-food surroundings. The cut and quality of fish is as good as any in town. The omakase or chef’s selection of sushi ($18) and sashimi ($20) included generous slices of the usual assortment of tuna, snapper, salmon, and yellowtail, as well as surf clam, raw scallop, and the more unusual raw shrimp and sea-urchin — a typically expensive item that costs $5-$10 a la carte in most sushi restaurants.

The feature attraction at Cutting Board is the rolls — more than 60 of them — named for prefectures in Japan. Each one contains an item relevant to the prefecture it is named after. For example, the Aomori roll, which contains apple, salmon, cream cheese, and avocado, is named after Aomori prefecture, perhaps the best-known apple growing region in Japan. The most expensive is the Tokyo roll ($12.50) with crab, shrimp tempura, and grilled eel. Most rolls are well under $10, and simple rolls like tuna and California rolls are $3. One of the restaurant’s most popular is the Shizuoka roll ($9.50) with tempura shrimp, spicy tuna, shiso leaf, and eel, named after Saito’s home region, about 100 miles south of Tokyo. Saito’s distinctive rolls may be driving business for the Georgetown restaurant. “The first year here was very slow,” said Saito, “but it’s getting better all the time.” From a marketing standpoint, sushi rolls are the best way to drum up business in a Japanese restaurant, although elaborate rolls are virtually unheard of in Japan, where diners stick to eating sushi in traditional ways, as nigiri or sashimi.