From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published June 15, 2007 Wasabi 2$ Marigny: 900 Frenchmen 943-9433 Lunch and dinner Mon.-Sat. AE DS MC V Complete menu available here. Japanese. The building doesn’t look like the kind of place where you’d find a sushi bar. It’s an old store built in an antique Creole style which (to my untrained eye) appears to date to the 1830s. It has few windows and a saturated exterior color scheme. Inside, however, we find a well-executed renovations, cool and spacious, with jazz playing on the sound system and tables scattered throughout the two rooms. Wasabi's sushi bar is in the larger, brighter rear room. Before looking at what’s in the case, take a gander at the marker board behind the bar. Here you’ll find the specials, including a few gems. They seem to have fresh sea scallops more often than I see them in other sushi place. These are the good kind, meaty and redolent of the sea, with a fabulous texture and flavor. Other specials are similarly welcome, and the regular offerings are fresh, presented at the right temperature, and eminently satisfying. You might want to get an appetizer here, even if you’re in the habit of jumping right into the sushi. Those scallops I mentioned are available in a cooked form, abetted by a good garlic butter. The tuna  or beef tataki (seared around the edges but mostly raw, served with ponzu) is especially good. So is the beef negimaki, grilled slices of meat wrapped around a core of green onions. Chewy, that, but tasty. The curried mussels are made with the inferior green-lipped mussels, but they’re good anyway, with a Thai-style sauce with coconut milk. More soups here than usual. They make a great seafood soup for two--in two different styles, yet. The non-sushi entrees are limited to the basics of the cuisine--tempura, teriyaki, noodles, and the like. Nothing like sukiyaki. But that’s just as well. Sushi and sashimi are the specialties. Wasabi is very popular among the denizens of Marigny, enough so that they maintain late hours on weekends. For awhile, they also ran a restaurant on Canal Boulevard, near the cemeteries--but that got washed away by the storm. Here in the Marigny, it's all excellence and consistency as usual, in that raffish old building. 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.