From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published December 11, 2007 Horinoya 3$ CBD: 920 Poydras 561-8914 Lunch Mon.-Fri. Dinner Mon.-Sat.. AE DC DS MC V Japanese. About six years ago the Horimotos--the couple who formerly ran the excellent Little Tokyo franchise on St. Charles Avenue--took over a little restaurant Le Pavillon Hotel. After giving a bright, comfortable renovation to the narrow room, they sat down and wrote the most ambitious menu you'll find in any local Japanese restaurant. And executed it. So well, in fact, that with a day's notice they can create a dinner of countless courses for $100. Or a scaled-down version for $60. Either way, it's worth every penny. Especially if your measure of dining fascination includes trying many new dishes. Many of those surface at Horinoya. For example, yamakake: tuna with mountain potato. Mountain potato? I had to look that one up. It's also known as "jinenjo," "mountain yam," and "yamaimo." It's grated and then cooked down into a rather thick, sticky paste that I can assure you is an acquired taste. That's no problem for many of the customers here. One night, when the place was packed and people were waiting to get in (on Poydras Street after dark? Wow!), only three tables were Westerners. Everybody else was speaking Japanese. At the mention of such stories, soft-core sushi eaters get discouraged. They shouldn't. As deep into Japanese cuisine as Horinoya goes, they take good care of all the more popular parts of the menu. They pass, for example, my standard sushi bar test: chirashi sushi. Chirashi (it means "scattered") is a bed of sushi rice pressed into a box, usually topped with something seafoody like bonito flakes or smelt roe. On top of that goes a standard assortment of sashimi. Here you get three kinds of fish, a shrimp, squid, small wedges of the funny sugar-sweetened Japanese omelettes, and garnishes. From this exercise I quickly learn about the quality and variety of the offerings at the sushi bar, as well as the generosity of the chef. Horinoya does well with this, except for the odd brown-sauce topping of the rice. On subsequent lunches and dinners, I went all over the road with my orders, and ate quite a few offbeat dishes. Monkfish liver, the japanese answer to foie gras. Grilled pompano with miso, rich and convincingly powerful and fatty. Broiled mackerel, as fishy a flavor as I was hoping for. (The more I eat strongly-flavored fish, the more I like them.) Grilled black cod, a highly-regarded fish in Japan, served here with a brothy sauce. Beef negimaki, a slice of grilled beef wrapped around a bundle of green onions (chewy, but nice). All those are appetizers. Among the entrees you find all the sushi, sashimi, teriyaki, tempura, and noodle dishes that you expect. But then the list continues into a realm of Japanese cookery that was left behind when sushi took off. In an effort to get the Japanese people to eat more meat (so the possibly-apocryphal story goes), the Emperor Meiji encouraged them to eat a new dish introduced by Dutch traders. Sukiyaki evolved from that. It's sauteed beef cooked in a sauce with mushrooms, cabbage, soy sauce, broth, sake, and a few other things. It's cooked down long enough that the beef completely absorbed the transforming flavors of the sauce. It's brought to the table in its pot and served communally. A simpler and better dish, shabu-shabu (so named for the sound that's made in its preparation) is thin slices of beef that the diner picks up with chopsticks and lowers into a pan of simmering broth. You swish it around in there, and it cooks almost immediately. Then you pass it through one of several sauces served with the dish. Both sukiyaki and shabu-shabu are served for a minimum of two people. They are so far out of vogue that it may be time for them to become popular again. Horinoya will give you good examples of both specialties. Horinoya's downtown location is an asset if you work there. It also has the distinction of being the second-nearest restaurant to the Superdome open on Saints game days. It's a little tougher to find parking if you come in from elsewhere in the daytime. No problem at all at night. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.