From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published January 3, 2008 Ninja 2$ Uptown: 8433 Oak 866-1119 Lunch and dinner Tues.-Sun. AE DC MC V Japanese. Every sushi bar has its own cadre of partisans who state, with absolute certainty, that their favorite is so obviously the best place to eat sushi that anyone who thinks otherwise must be stupid. No sushi bar attracts a larger or more strident bunch of regulars than does Ninja. I am not one of them, and think that a half-dozen other sushi bars are in its league. But I do think Ninja is the best. Ninja began life in the cottage where Iris is now. It moved about five years ago to a much larger building on the Oak Street commercial strip. It's busier than it's ever been. easily overcoming the local disdain for dining rooms on the second floor. It's clean, bright, and comfortable--not as sleek as the likes of Sake Café, but a happy place. Atmosphere takes second place to food here anyway. Ninja offers as complete a menu as any other Japanese restaurant in town, and the sushi is more carefully made from a greater selection of seafood than I've seen anywhere else. I always find myself marveling at the tactile excellence of the tuna and the salmon, and the fresh scent-of-the-sea freshness of it all. You get the best of all this at the sushi bar, where your first order of business is to engage the sushi chef. Ask him (or her--she's the owner, and the main artist) what's especially good. You'll learn about the usual tuna and yellowtail and all that, but press further to unveil the offbeat items they might get only once in awhile. Whatever they are, try them. They really won't be that strange. And once you make the jump to eating raw fish, you're already 98 percent of the way to the ultimate. Although you save quite a bit of money by ordering the standard sushi assortments from the menu, you'll get better quality and attention by ordering custom assortments. The sushi chefs realyl get into designing your platter. Not all sushi restaurants are that way, but Ninja is. Also, ask for variations on the themes. Get something wrapped with tofu or rice paper. Something squirted with sriracha hot sauce. There are all a superb changes of flavor from soy sauce and wasabi, and really perks up the palate. Like all other sushi places these days, Ninja is making complex rolls and box sushi. In these, several kinds of fish are layered into the final product. Sometimes barbecued eel, soft-shell crab, and that awful mayonnaisey salad Japanese restaurants make with snow crab gets tucked inside. These are lovely to behold, but I find them nearly impossible to eat without their falling apart. I also find the various fish fighting one another. I like simple rolls. The menu of cooked dishes at Ninja is decent, but several other places do that kind of stuff better. Even when the cooking is minimal--as in tuna tataki, for which the tuna is just barely seared around the edges--the final product lacks excitement. The teriyaki and tempura dishes are boring. There is one platter I can recommend, though. The seafood platter brings sauteed salmon, scallops, squid (the big kind, that looks like a small white waffle iron), shrimp, and mussels come out sizzling on a hot skillet with fresh asparagus and mushrooms. That's a nice presentation and good flavor. Also, the grilled eel over rice--a Japanese standard--tastes the same as it does anywhere else. Ninja maintains a small but interesting wine list, although beer has always seemed to me the more appropriate beverage. (More so than sake, which I've never been a fan of.) Desserts are limited to ice cream, including one version in which the ice cream is coated in tempura batter and fried. That sounds much more interesting than it is. The service staff here is on the spot. Many members of the family that owns the place are in the dining room and elsewhere, and they keep everybody happy. Especially the regulars. 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.