Ah, Osaka, a magical business center of a city full of shopping malls, tall buildings and great restaurants. The food in Osaka needs to be readily available for quick office lunches and late dinners, so the city specializes in quick grilled specialties such as broiled eel and okonomiyaki (dinner cabbage pancake, my favorite grilled food), and raw fish quicky joints known kaiten rotating sushi bars. In Osaka, people aren’t about the beauty of the countryside or the ancient ruins surrounding the city as much as they are concerned with making everyday life easy, fun, and full of good food, due to long work hours and being surrounded by shops. I feel much the same way as someone from Osaka as I hunt for a quick sushi lunch in New York during the week. When I enter a restaurant that shares a name with Osaka, the busy, bustling, Japanese city, I am looking for a quick, delicious lunch that doesn’t try to hard to impress while still making decent food that I can think fondly on later. It doesn’t have to be the best food, but the experience, speed, and price of the meal should elevate my mental image of said meal above silly things like quality when I’m in a hurry. I visited Osaka restaurant in Astoria on one such day, when I had little time, but I still wanted a good lunch.
Osaka Japanese Cuisine, 25-24 Broadway, Astoria, NY
Osaka Japanese Cuisine, 25-24 Broadway, Astoria, NY (718) 777-2662
Experience: 14
Food: 13
Bill: 18
Quality: 6
Creativity: 7
Flavor: 6
Service: 7
Total: 71
EXPERIENCE: Never have I entered an Osaka sushi restaurant that reminded me of Osaka city itself. This Astoria restaurant was no different, but I’m not going to dock any points for something I’ve rarely seen. The only restaurant in New York that has made me feel like I was back in Osaka was a place called Kenka in St. Marks Place, which I will review eventually. This restaurant was clean and white, lacking any particular style, except for the usual wood finish to make me feel like I was in a sushi house (which I was!). When a restaurant’s style is simplistic, I expect the food to be, too. The waiters there quickly and happily brought me the menu and lunch menu, and I quickly noticed another ten dollar special that would nab me three rolls. Having tried yellowtail at the last few restaurants I’ve reviewed, I decided to mix it up and order the white tuna roll, the spicy tako (octopus) roll, and the shrimp tempura roll. I also ordered an eel roll to see how they grill their fish. I received a simple miso soup served Japanese-style in a small bowl, with optional spoon, and only a few minutes after my soup arrived, so did my sushi (This was less than ten minutes after I had entered the restaurant, so I was very pleased with the speed and good will of the staff). After finishing my sushi and asking for the check, the waiter took my card eagerly and quickly returned it, thanking me for coming. And then I left. While the interior of the restaurant left a lot to be desired, it made me want quick and easy food, and that’s exactly what I received. The entire experience reminded me of quick business lunches in Osaka, too, so that 20 minute sushi meal ended up resonating with me more than some of the 2 hour dining experiences I’ve had at other sushi restaurants. In the end, I gave the restaurant a score of 14 because it wasn’t anything special, but it gave me an experience I could return to easily. A little more decor and attention to surroundings could have easily boosted this place’s score.
FOOD: The first thing I ate at Osaka was the Miso soup. It was powder based, but so are most of NYC’s miso soups. It was a good temperature, though, and was not treated like an epic creation, just something to keep me occupied while my sushi was (very) quickly prepared. I tried the white tuna roll first, and the first thing I noticed was the fishy taste in it. This was not a good start, but I found that the fishiness was eradicated easily with a little bit of soy sauce. Many New York sush restaurants remedy their bad fish by salting their fish or rolls, which always makes it difficult to taste the fish itself, so I always respect a restaurant that gives me their fish as-is. In this case, the fish wasn’t bad. It was flavorful, even! That little bit of aftertaste would stay with me, though. The next thing I tried was the spicy tako roll. I have seen very few restaurants find a way to make an octopus roll, so I was intrigued by this one. To make the roll, it seems as if they added some tempura flakes to help hold the octopus together, and added some mayo mixed with wasabi and some kind of hot sauce. Well, this roll was delicious. The octopus was prepared just fine, which is saying something for a sushi bar in the middle of queens (most places in Manhattan that boast amazing fish will still have so-so octopus), but it was the flavors in this simple little roll that elevated it. It wasn’t too spicy, but the crunch together with the chewy octopus and salty, spicy, shellfish, and mustard flavors that combined in my mouth didn’t overpower each other (like so many deluxe rolls excel at), and created a roll that stood out among those that I’ve recently had (did I mention it costs $4.50? AWESOME). The third roll I tried was the shrimp tempura roll, which was fine. Big enough to be filling, while soft enough and thin enough to easily fit into my mouth (that’s what she said). The only issue with the roll was the same issue with all the rolls; stability. The rice at Osaka contained a little too much rice vinegar, so the rolls all had a bit of vinegar taste to them (serious flavor points down for that), and whatever the vegetables were kept in made them slippery, so they didn’t hold together well. This all resulted in sushi rolls that were very delicate, falling apart in my hand and leaving piles of rice in my soy sauce. The tempura roll had the hardest time staying together, requiring me to practically cup it in order to eat it. The eel and avocado combined with the tempura roll was tasty enough, though, so the roll itself was cheap and decent. The last roll I had was the eel roll, which was average, and there’s not much more to say about it. Osaka is not a grill-based restaurant (as their name implies), and their eel roll reflected that, being under-grilled, covered in eel sauce, and a little too sweet. By the way, at some point I’m going to have to try something on their menu called Sushi-Pizza, which apparently is a variety of sushi spread out on cooked batter with a light sauce on top. If the fish were of higher quality, I’d be heading over there to try it right now! In the end I gave food a score of 13 because quick food should still be good, and Osaka was missing a few standards that would have elevated the score. One or two interesting rolls does not a great restaurant make, and even low prices can’t make up for that taste from the white tuna I can still imagine as I write this review. Quality and flavor received scores of 6 and creativiy received a score of 7 because the sushi was not terrible, nor was it terribly special. I’ve had better fish at many restaurants in New York, and while that octopus roll was pretty great, this place needs to make more food with creativity like that in order to really stand out. The sushi tasted too much like vinegar thanks to the rice, and without that taste in the rolls, I would have hands down given taste a higher score thanks to the delicious tempura roll ingredients and spicy roll ingredient combinations.
BILL: Since this place had lower quality of fish, the bill suddenly becomes very important. Luckily for Osaka, they are very generous with their menu. Most rolls are in the $4 range, the shrimp tempura roll is even $5 for a fairly filling and tasty option! Even the deluxe rolls here (which I ignored as usual, only to look at the menu tonight and gasp) are often reasonably priced, with some of them under $8 and most under $9 for some somewhat filling looking gourmet options. My lunch here was $11, but the same three rolls for dinner would have cost me about 15, which is completely reasonable. The food was good enough and the experience fast and friendly enough to make these prices really make Osaka someplace I could come back to for a sushi fix again and again when I can’t afford the big-time sushi bars. I gave the bill a score of 18 because it not only completely changed my opinion of this restaurant (it went from okay to pretty great), but it also reminded me of great, quick sushi lunches in Japan that may not have tasted perfect, but made my day better nonetheless. The servers helped achieve this with friendly dispositions. They didn’t know much about the fish available, but they did want to serve me quickly and correctly, so service gets a solid score of 7.
Osaka may not have been a perfect grill house (though I’ll have to try that sushi pizza sometime), but it tried hard to please me and made me a couple of delicious rolls I won’t soon forget. Though the fish was not very special, and the white tuna was definitely sub-par, the food at this surprising ‘hole-in-the wall’ is cheap enough and delicious enough to make me want to go back there for more, and that’s more than I can say for some of the fancier, tastier places I’ve eaten at.
