Anybody who’s done time in the restaurant industry knows the correct knee-jerk reaction to a roomful of customers cooking their own food: “Suckers.” And a shabu-shabu restaurant–where customers get a plate of raw meat, vegetables, tofu, and noodles and a pot of boiling water to swish it all around in–sounds like a recipe for the food-as-enforced-fun experience whose appeal to the bored and tasteless has made a fortune for chains like Ed Debevic’s and Benihana.
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But Shabu-ya, which opened December 27, is at least for now a pleasant and low-key place. The boiling water (I should’ve thought of this) pretty much keeps away the family crowd, and the room is small, quiet, and unobtrusively decorated except for the steam-sucking Seussian metal hoods hovering above each place at the shabu-shabu bar. Thirty-two-year-old owner B.J. Kim could double for a first-time waiter; he zips around reassuring himself that nobody’s water glass is empty, gives detailed instructions on cooking technique, and nervously asks customers if they like the flavors of the dipping sauces, which he researched at shabu-shabu restaurants in Japan. He even apologizes for the plain presentation of the food: “It’s just raw ingredients–all we can do is pile it on the plate!”
Kim’s sweet sauces make the other ingredients sing, and you can adjust their flavor by adding grated daikon to the citrusy ponzu sauce (“Women like that sauce better,” Kim claims), fresh pureed garlic to the goma dare (sesame sauce, allegedly preferred by men), or chopped scallions to either. Kim offers a seafood plate–scallops, shrimp, calamari, and mussels–that isn’t bad and a vegetarian version that’s, well, cheap, but neither compares to the real thing. Traditional shabu-shabu restaurants offer only the beef and its accompaniments, but Kim figured Shabu-ya’s “all yuppie” neighborhood would demand lighter options (though the thinness of the slices makes the beef plate pretty ephemeral anyway).
