Kaze Sushi

Since I landed in Chicago, I’ve been seriously craving sushi. I had sushi with my college roommates the first night I got here (some place in Evanston that was pretty good) and I made reservations for Kaze Sushi for Wednesday night with another friend. We were deciding between two sushi restaurants but people said Kaze Sushi was some of the best sushi they’d had in Chicago, so my friend and I decided to go to Kaze. We arrived a bit early (around 6pm) and the restaurant was completely empty. After being seated and looking through our menus, our waiter gave us a rundown of all of the specials and things that are really great on the menu. I decided to order the duck entree and six different types of rolls. The duck entree was brought out first:

The duck was surprisingly tender and well cooked in a white wine reduction with apples and raisins. At first I was a little iffy on the sauce because I’m not a fan of raisins in food, but then I realized it was actually really delicious with the duck (I even ate the sauce after the duck was finished!). The tempura shiitake mushrooms reminded me of carnival fries (same oily smell and a little tastier) and the sweet potato fries on top of the duck were crunchy but good. The boiled spinach was cold on one side and slightly warm on the other (the duck was keeping it warm), but overall, the dish wasn’t very hot/felt like it sat out a while before it was brought over to us. There were too many different temperatures in the food that it was kind of hard to stomach. My friend (who shall not be named for privacy reasons), was finishing up the meal when he thought he ate a hard piece of duck, but when he took it out of his mouth, he saw that it was a broken piece of plastic! Isn’t that absolutely TERRIBLE?!

After we alerted our waiter and he profusely apologized, he brought out our rolls – 6 different types of rolls including a dragon roll with salmon, a shrimp tempura roll, a negi hamachi roll, a spicy tuna roll, a spicy salmon roll, and a spicy tuna eel roll. Here’s a picture of three of the rolls:

And the other three:

My biggest complaint, which I mention in the video review, is that there isn’t enough fish in any of the rolls! The hamachi roll had TINY TINY pieces of hamachi (I couldn’t even call it a hamachi roll, I’d call it a ROLL OF RICE). I also had to send back the soft shell crab with salmon because the salmon was seriously rubbery and couldn’t be chewed through. The other rolls were fairly decent, except the shrimp tempura had too much batter on it and I could only taste the tempura, not the shrimp.

For dessert, we decided to share the black sesame flan:

My first question – why is black sesame flan GREEN?! Second question – why does it look like there are spider babies on the plate?! The flan tasted more like peanut butter than black sesame and was very creamy (as a random side note, my mom sometimes mixes black sesame with almonds and soybeans to make soy milk – it’s quite delicious if you drink it cold).

Kazi Sushi had a great open space and lively atmosphere, but it couldn’t make up for the sub-par food.

My video review:

Kaze Sushi Review from Grace Yang on Vimeo.