Week of January 3rd 2011: Coach Sushi

...and now back to our regular programming. Sorry for the light reading lately, it's been busy at work. Unfortunately, I seem to be getting further away from my goal of staying within a month of present time, much less catching up. Anyways...

For a couple of weeks, Eddy had been telling me about a sushi restaurant in Oakland that had an endless sake special for $3.50. It seemed like a fun way to hang out with some friends and get dinner on a Friday night after climbing.

The story behind Coach Sushi is pretty cool. It's not a place to go and get trashed on inexpensive sake. It's a fun social, experience in a restaurant where the owner wants his guests to have a good night.

When you order the sake, the servers bring around a little cedar box for each person in your party. Then, Coach comes around and explains to you that sake is supposed to be drunk out of unfiltered cedar boxes. He then fills your box, instructs you to put a little bit of salt on the corner of it, and that your first drink must be taken hands-free.

Oh, and Coach never lets your box get empty... but we'll get to that later.

Once the rest of our party arrived we ordered food. Unfortunately, this wasn't the highlight of the night. I ordered the Coach Roll and the Dancing Bonito Roll. Both were rather little (for the price at least, which kind of counteracted the good deal on the sake) and smelled/tasted rather fishy. I love fish, but that fishy taste is the last thing I want to experience at a sushi restaurant. My two rolls left me rather hungry so I ordered my favorite, salmon sashimi (which in retrospect, probably wasn't the best choice if my other two dishes were fishy) which turned out to be pretty good when compared to what I'd already tried.

Once we'd had our fill of sushi, we thought we'd take a peek at dessert. Eddy had never tried tempura ice cream. He told me he like green tea ice cream but just had never tried it with the whole deep-fried-and-covered-in-chocolate thing. "Eddy," I asked, "what doesn't get better deep fried and covered in chocolate?" He didn't know. "Nothing," I said. Needless to say, I think he enjoyed it.

Since we were nearing the end of our meal, we started winding down our sake boxes. Unfortunately, this proved to be rather difficult. Since Coach would never let a box get empty, it was very difficult to come to a stopping point. We realized the only solution was to drink the sake box quickly, and then flip it over so that he couldn't fill it up again. This worked for most of our table but I got very involved in a conversation and next thing I knew, Coach was rushing over to our table with his sake bottle... Apparently, while I was distracted, Eddy took the liberty of flipping my box back over, but luckily our friend Matt drew my attention to it before Coach could fill it back up.

Overall, it was a really fun night. The restaurant also lets you decorate or buy your box and take it home if you'd like. They had plenty of back ups.