Paris is released

Our long national nightmare is over.


(sorry for the lack of posts, I will be busy until the end of July)

Update

We here at Nashville Sushi welcome our newest member, Little Ed Jr. our daily ray of Sunshine. Little Ed and I go back many years, even before Kosova, and I look forward to his writing. He has forgotten more about Unix driven cryptography than I ever learned, and his mastery of tonal variance is second to none, Welcome aboard Sunshine!

We also welcome our first comment from Vicki, who said my last post was an over simplification of the issue. I don’t take offense to this as I invited Vicki to the site and it’s not the first time she has called me a simpleton.

The Wasabi Princess should be along shortly.

What the fuck???

From the AP:

"WASHINGTON - The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms. Backed by the Justice Department, the measure would give the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales, licenses or permits to terror suspects."

You mean to tell me it has been 5 1/2 years since 9/11 and no one thought to do anything about terror suspects buying guns? Hell we lock people up with no proof, wire tap every body, throw out habeas corpus and generally play havoc with the Bill of Rights and until the democrats took charge of Congress no body thought to stop Osama Bin Laden from buying a 12 gauge?

Sonobona

So this is the post that is actually about sushi. After the wedding, and after yet another trip to the hotel bar to make sure our vodka level was in it’s proper balance to better channel our Feng shui, the Wasabi Princess and myself decided that sushi was in order. We by passed the three basic downtown sushi bars (a more detailed report will come some time on all of these) Okinawa, Omikoshi, and Ru Son (Okinawa we skipped because of the parking, Ru Son because of the trendy yuppies and country singers that hang around and Omikoshi because,,, well fuck because I forgot about it) and made our way to Sonobona’s on White Bridge Road. Sonobona’s was until last year or so called Benkay’s and is noteworthy because it shares a parking lot with the Target that Jessica Simpson shops at when she is in town (true story by the way.)

When we go on a sushi expedition, Wasabi and I tend to order in a fairly set pattern, I always order a Rainbow roll and Philly/Bagel roll, while Wasabi orders a salad (in the photo above it was the crab/cucumber) and whatever the hottest damn thing on the menu is. That way I can compare one sushi place another on even terms, and Wasabi Princess can bitch about how damn hot it is and wonder if they are trying to kill her. A Rainbow roll (the one across the top of the plate in the photo above) has usually about 6 types of fish and a slice of avocado, whereas the Philly/bagel roll has cucumber, smoked salmon and cream cheese wrapped in seaweed and rice. It is called either philly (for the cream cheese) or bagel (because it tastes just like a bagel with lox and cream cheese) depending on where you order it.

Sonobona does a pretty good job overall food wise and is a good benchmark to compare other bars to. The flavor was rich in every part of the Rainbow, and the smokiness of the salmon shown thru in the Philly. I seldom try Wasabi’s hot roll as whenever I have in the past I have become convinced that she only orders them in an effort to kill me. It won’t work though, I haven’t named her in my insurance as yet.

The best part of Sonobona is the atmosphere. They feature a classic tea room set up where everyone sits on the floor, but we didn’t do that as there were just two of us, that area is non smoking and I felt that at least one of us would not have been able to get back up given the vodka from the wedding. No, the best part is that the restaurant connects to an oriental grocery that rents Japanese videos, which we imagined to be porn. For all I know it was Japanese soap operas, but as the tapes were all plain black sleeves with Japanese writing on them, and I am about as likely to read Japanese as Dick Cheney is to accidentally tell the truth, their contents remain a mystery.

All in all Sonobona’s is worth the trip over to White Bridge Road, especially when Jessica Simpson is in town.

The post before the first post about sushi

This is the post before the first post about sushi. I haven’t written much lately due to the demands placed on me as a world class blog writer person. Actually I haven’t written because I could not write this post until my friend that got married came back and we had a chance to talk about her wedding as I would never hurt her feelings in a million years.

Anyway, a couple of Saturdays ago one of my best friends got married. It was a beautiful ceremony at a grand old hotel here in town. There was a lavish reception with plenty of food, champagne and dancing. I don’t dance but I might have since the champagne was great, perfectly chilled and as some can attest champagne brings out the stupid in me. It makes me think I have some notion of rhythm.

I have no sense of rhythm, and any number of drummers I have worked with over the last 27 years can attest to this.

The finger sandwiches were horrid. Simply terrible, and it was due to this I could not write about it until Monday when the blushing bride returned from her honeymoon to announce to me that she thought they sucked. So it became ok for me to say so as well.

They sucked. They sucked bad. They sucked in much the same way that a week in Cancun doesn’t suck. And the sushi was gone by the time I returned from the bar, except for some sort of grilled chicken teriyaki which was really good, if by “really good” you mean "it also sucked."

But the bride and the groom are wonderful people, and their families were really, really nice and I think it was my favorite wedding in at least the last decade.

Also there was an extremely tall, insanely hot dentist who was a great dancer and fun to watch. If the dental thing doesn’t work out she should consider a career in the exhibitionist arts.

During the ceremony two U2 songs were used which permanently endeared the bride to my co author on this site, the Wasabi Princess. The Princess looked fabulous, ravishing in fact. After we found a table with some folks I know from school, we cut out to the bar down stairs so the Princess could grab a smoke and we could both grab some vodka. This hotel is quite old and proud of the mens room outside the bar which is tiled and decorated in art deco style. After showing it to the Princess, and after quite a bit more vodka we returned to our table.

I stepped away from the table to fetch more champagne and my friends asked where we had been. The Princess replied “The men’s room down stairs.”

When this was met with stares of confusion she added “It’s blow job Saturday. We had to go to the men’s room.”

It was about that time when I knew why I love her.

It was also about that time when we decided to go back to the bar before heading out for sushi.

This post is not about sushi

Eventually readers might ask why this site has sushi in the title.
From time to time my co writer and myself go out for sushi. We have for the last several years been on a quest to find the perfect sushi restaurant in Nashville. Among other things we will chronicle that quest here.

Nashville is a long way from the ocean, and a long way from the orient. Austin, TX claims to be the live music capital of America, but Nashville is the music capital of the whole fucking world. The slowest night for music in Nashville is Tuesday when there are never more than 2 or 3 major and mid major acts trying out new material at venues around town. Nashville is known for country, but americana, alt, bluegrass, blues, jazz, opera, classical, punk, emo, techno, industrial and the drunken rumblings of crack heads can all be found here at any time. We aren’t going to write about that though. None of those folks can be found playing at sushi bars. (Which isn’t to say there won’t be the occasional celebrity sighting, like Emmylou Harris at Petsmart or Keith Urban at Cracker Barrel.)

That Nashville is along way from the orient makes great sushi a challenge to find. There are numerous sushi bars in Nashville and more opening all the time though, so there is a future in sushi reviews here.

The second post is easier

When I was a child, probably no more than 6 or so, I had a book by Mae Blacker Freeman called “You will go to the Moon.” Later I would learn that the book had been published originally in 1959, but a 6 year old with a book that has a picture of the Cat in the Hat on the cover telling him that he can read it all by himself has little interest in publication dates.

The premise of the book was that in the future that would come in my life space travel would become so common that everyone would be traveling to the moon, where they would live and work and vacation, driving moon cars and staying at moon bases with other people that had decided to live and work and vacation on the moon. The future was like that back then, it held a lot of promise.

Among the promises the future held, in addition to moon bases and moon vacations, were flying cars and robotic talking dogs. We didn’t get those either.

My generation was promised a lot of things. The “greatest generation”, so named by Tom Brokaw, made those promises in our books, our movies, our cartoons, our amusement parks and so on, but along the way those promises were lost. I don’t think it was the greatest generation that lost them, they had the vision. It was the baby boomers that followed them that decided that computers and cellular phones and hand guns made of plastic were a more feasible vision and built those instead of moon bases.

Maybe they were right but I was promised the moon and robotic talking dogs. I will trade my cell phone for a flying car.