From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published August 28, 2007 Kanno 2$ Metairie: 3205 Edenborn Ave Lunch and dinner, Tues.-Sat. 455-5730 AE, DC, DS, MC, V. Japanese. Kanno calls itself a California-style sushi bar, but if you figure out what that means, let me know. After going through a lot of its offerings, what I find is a more or less standard Japanese menu, executed reasonably well, with less emphasis on the visual than in the best local sushi bars, but good flavor in everything. The restaurant is in the middle of an old strip mall, dead center in what we call less and less often Fat City, around the corner from Drago's. Not much on decor. There was a sushi buffet here for awhile, but the current owners are more serious about their work, as well as about their raw materials. A menu item that caught my eye here was the Kanno chef's special dinner, described only as five courses with a homemade dessert. The chef asked me whether I had any allergies or preferences; I told him I didn't want any escolar, and had no problem with peppery flavors. Then he went to work. The first source was a reddish-brown, opaque spicy soup with half a small soft-shell crab in it. Indeed, this was as pepper-hot a dish as I think I've ever had in a Japanese restaurant, pushing against (but not exceeding) my threshold for such things. It did, however, force me to eat slowly. I discovered that it's hard to eat a soft-shell crab with one of those Asian spoons. Good start. Next came seared albacore tuna with carrots and a celery-like vegetable, with something like a ponzu sauce. This was also on the peppery side, but since it was cold, it was less challenging. Good fish in there. Next came little dish of raw, marinated tuna squares, mixed with caviar, avocado slices, and lumps of crabmeat too big and too generously served to convince me that they were from nearby waters. The flavors leaned in the direction of acidic this time, lending a welcome contrast to the repast. Now the best dish of this collection: fresh salmon and tuna, sashimi-style, with thin slices of apple and a crunchy green vegetable that the chef identified only as "spicy vegetable." It was only a little peppery, really, enough to set off the sweetness of the sauce nicely. Then came pinwheels of baked salmon topped with snow crab and more of that hyper-jumbo crab lumps, served warm in an orange-hued sauce that could be called a Japanese remoulade (I'm pretty sure it was mayonnaise-based, a common idea these days in Japanese restaurants). This was by far the most filling dish, and the least interesting. But I am no fan of snow crab. The homemade dessert proved to be three morsels of chocolate. The cost of all this was thirty-five dollars--about the amount I would spend on a typical sushi dinner, a little more interesting than most. But only a little. This place has some very avid regular customers who rave about it a lot, but in this and other samplings of the offerings I've not seen a particular advantage over ten other sushi bars I could think of. Maybe you have to be a regular. 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.