From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published September 19, 2007 Sushi Brothers Ratings: 85, 2$ Lee Circle Area: 1612 St. Charles Ave. 581-4449 Lunch Mon.-Sat. Dinner seven nights. AE DC DS MC V www.sushibrothers.net Japanese. This old storefront on St. Charles Avenue has been a Japanese restaurant long enough for three notable sushi bars to have come through, each which performed a bit of renovation that never brings the place up to what you'd call glitzy. Walk up the brick ramp now and find a brighter, more spare design than the place had in the past. (At one time, they had those dropped-down tables that made you feel is if you were sitting on the floor, but that's gone out of vogue.) The Sushi Brothers keeps up the tradition of first-class food here. Although it's not as good as when the place was a franchise of Little Tokyo (those people now own Horinoya), it's still well above average. The name gives the specialty away. Although the menu includes the more familiar cooked Japanese dishes, it stops with the basics, and puts most of the emphasis on the works of the sushi bar. The selection is enormous, with a good supply of first-class fish. As I shopped the long list of special rolls, I finally succumbed to a curiosity. In sushi bars throughout the city, you find rolls whose names make reference to the hurricane we're trying to forget. Not only that, but they're the same names and formulae everywhere you go. It's as if all the sushi bar owners got together and made them up. (A more logical explanation: they changed the names of rolls that had become popular in other cities.) So I got the FEMA roll. With a name like that, it should have been awful, right? It wasn't, but I'll never order that again. It's fresh salmon, asparagus, avocado, and that mayonnaise-logged crab salad inside the rice, with spicy tuna on top. Spicy tuna is more or less tuna tartare, probably made from the trimmings of the pieces of tuna whose centers will become sashimi. (Nothing wrong with that, but it's not the prime meat.) The Bye-Bye Katrina roll has nothing raw in it. Snow crab (near the bottom of my list of sushi ingredients is held in place by rice paper, with broiled eel, shrimp tempura, and avocado in the middle. Who finds this combination toothsome? Not me. One I was past the novelties, everything was fine. Very good yellowtail and mackerel. Pretty good tuna. Excellent lemonfish (second only to tuna among local fish as a making of sushi, if you ask me).         The most original food here is in the soup department. They have a miso gumbo. That's standard miso soup with shrimp, fish, half a small soft-shell crab, and okra. It tastes nothing like gumbo, but it's good, and they give you a large bowel of it for six bucks. Even better is the Cajun miso soup, a rather spicy, thick potage with as much a Vietnamese flavor as a Cajun one, with crawfish, shrimp, cabbage, and cilantro. And there are a couple more along these lines that I've yet to try. The sushi bar is comfortable (many aren't), and the service there is friendly and good. 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.