Very Good

By M. H. Reed
Briarcliff Manor
 Japanese restaurants are fast becoming a neighborhood staple, diners looking for foods without additional additives, more fish in their diets, and tasty variety in small, satisfying portions.

A superior sushi restaurant stocks a decent variety of lustrous and tender raw fish.
It molds rice perfectly so that the grains neither clump nor tumble apart. It employs wasabi with restraint, so that it doesn't overwhelm the flavor of the fish. And it proudly shows off the finished whole of these parts, in creative design and careful presentation. Yama Fuji does all of this.

Yama's menu offers fatty yellowtail, salmon, tuna, fluke, snapper, the blackboard lists seasonal specials like scallops, uni, and white salmon.
Diners might like to begin with sashimi, with a garnish, perhaps of soy sauce, wasabi or lemon. One of my favorites is shiso leaf, with it's pungent mint-basil fragrance. Shiso or a drop of lemon can enhance an oily fish like mackerel or yellowtail. Refresh the palate with a leaf of pickled ginger.

The sushi chefs are so skilled that on one visit, we trusted the vision of the sushi master and chose from a long list of composed "rolled sushi." Forget rice-fat California rolls, rather crass in this company. Many of Yama's succulent rolls contained only a thin, almost invisible layer of rice. several skipped using rice entirely. What often held the rolls intact were overlapping wafers of avocado, cucumber, daikon or fish. Yes, fish, which encased a complex center of another piece of fish. In all cases, the combinations were delicious and quite gorgeous.

Some of the delightful combinations included crab, avocado and tangy reddish sprouts (kaiware) in translucent strips of cucumber (naruta crab roll); yellowtail and avocado captured in tuna (Yama roll), yellowtail and fluke wrapped in paper-thin layers of salmon, eel, and tuna (Chilmark roll), and eel, lobster, shrimp tempura and avocado in soy bean seaweed (New York roll). Bonsai Tree roll, listed under appetizers, was a buttery combination of tuna, salmon, yellowtail and avocado wrapped with a wisp of daikon. Only nori-wrapped tuna roll missed the mark; the tough seaweed needed crisping. Although a few fish are described as spiced, hot spiciness was largely undetectable.

Some rolls came topped with tobiko, those tiny, crackly iridescent eggs also known as flying fish roe, which always contributes to a splendid, festive looking display. Orange is the natural color of the shimmery eggs, but Yama's chefs often topped rolls with a roe of a different color: green form wasabi powder, red fro chilies, black from squid ink and yellow from ginger.

A few cooked dishes are available but they pale in comparison to the excellent fish and rice, this restaurant's specialty. Nothing was particularly special about stir-fried beef with thin noodles (yaki soba), nor about light, lacy but routine shrimp tempura. Cylinders of beef negimaki proved unpleasantly tough.