Photo: Stephen Clarke
A recent dinner at the Ritz-Carlton’s Taikun sushi restaurant included a number of surprising firsts.
For example, who’d have thought to pair sweet German Riesling wine with sushi? When our host for the evening, banquets manager Arjun Gopi, first suggested the wine, we thought he must be a little mad, but we had put ourselves in his hands, so we agreed to try it.
He brought three different types of Riesling, a sweet, a medium sweet and a dry. The sweet was to accompany the spicy tuna sashimi on our plates and it offers a perfect balance to the spice of the fleshy fish, the medium went very well with the octopus and the dry wine was excellent with the salmon sushi.
Just before the first course of our meal arrived, but after the complimentary bowl of tasty miso soup, our waiter arrived at our table with a green root of fresh wasabi and a grater made from shark skin, as used by sushi chefs all over Japan. He grated the pungent wasabi into small glass dishes, which are created specially for the restaurant in Australia, poured some soy sauce and we were ready to dip the first succulent piece of fish in it.
Having never tried fresh wasabi before, I was surprised to find that, while it tasted like the wasabi I’d had before, it was much milder, with none of the burn usually associated with the green stuff.
As expected from a restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton, the fish was superbly fresh, firm and tasty. Arjun says all the restaurant’s fish is either caught locally in Cayman waters or is flown fresh from Miami. “The fish we fly down from Miami is also caught in Caribbean waters,” he says.
Taikun’s Korean head chef, Jun Sun, prepares dishes in front of customers, behind the sushi counter at which diners can sit to watch him prepare the colourful and elaborate bite-sized morels of deliciousness.
The restaurant opened last November, although the Silver Palm lounge bar at the hotel has been serving sushi for several years.
“This is the freshest sushi on the Island. The chef takes great pride in what he puts out and there are days when we reject the fish because it is not up to our standard,” Arjun says. “We use the best product available.”
As though to highlight that point, a stylishly presented, shelved presentation dish with an assortment of sushi and sashimi appeared before us. Rather than choosing from the menu, we had asked Chef Jun Sun to send us anything he thought we might enjoy. He didn’t disappoint. We quickly worked our way through the selection, deciding with each mouthful which of the Rieslings would suit each flavour.
Among the selection was cilantro snapper, made from marinated local snapper, wasabi tobiko, cilantro ponzu and jalapeño pepper - an interesting blend of Japanese and Caribbean flavours.
To accompany the meal, we also had a bottle of cold sake. Arjun explained that the sake was made from rice of which each grain was finely polished to a fraction of its original size. The sake was made only from those fermented grains, with no additional alcohol added, as happens with many other cold sakes. Sake is often heated to burn off the alcohol that is added to the sake, he said.
He also had another surprise in store for us - sparkling sake. This is the first time sparkling sake has been available in Cayman, having been delivered to the restaurant that week, after a long search.
The sparkling Fukuju Awasaki tastes a little like lemonade or ginger ale, not too sweet, with sharp bubbles and a short finish. Quite frankly, it’s delicious.
For our final dishes, we decided to turn to the menu and ordered the Wagyu seared beef, which came with shitake mushrooms, arugula and teriyaki jus. That was another winner. The Australian beef was tender and flavoursome and the mushrooms and jus were the perfect accompaniment.
Arjun suggested we try one more dish - the tiger prawns tempura maki. I’m not usually a fan of tempura dishes, but this one was a stunner – large fresh prawn tempuras, wrapped in rice and seaweed and rolled in sesame seeds and orange tobiko (flying fish roe). It looked amazing and was utterly delicious.
We decided we had just enough room to handle one scoop of ice-cream each for dessert. I opted for the mango and passion fruit while my dining companion chose the chocolate truffle cappuccino.
To accompany our dessert, Arjun offered a glass of Kobai plum wine, a sweet and mellow wine that was the perfect way to finish up a spectacular meal. Kampai! WH