Isaribi: Dining in the Key of Sea
793 Harbor Blvd., Destin, 650-3300

Hours: Open Mon.-Sat. for lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., dinner at 5 p.m., Sun. at 12 noon.
Reservations: Accepted
Children’s Menu: Will accommodate
Major credit cards
Dress: Casual

By Bruce Collier
August 21, 2008 Issue

We ate at Isaribi on a Monday night, among a succession of groups—young guys out for sushi and beer, a vacationing party, a mom and her small daughters, a few take-out customers. The staff, dressed in casual black, functioned like a team. A pair of sushi masters greet customers with a quick bow and a greeting in Japanese. You can eat at the sushi bar—pointing and ordering as you go—or sit at a table. There is one large dining room, and a curtained private room running along the side. The decor is dark, polished wood, metal trim, and Japanese-themed pictures and art works. The lighting is romantically dim, with candles on the tables. The overall effect is clean and simple, like the guiding principles of Japanese cooking.

Sushi and sashimi, Japan's stellar contribution to world cuisine, are center stage, but there are plenty of other choices—beef, chicken and vegetable—if you're not having fish. I can't think of another culture that has embraced seafood more fully than Japan. Japanese diners revel in the mainstream—tuna, shrimp, oysters—as well as acquired tastes like oily mackerel, sea urchin, flying fish roe, monkfish liver and eel. "Everything but the shell" could be their credo, though I have been offered that, too.

We gave the menu a good run. It deserves study. There are soups and salads, hot and cold starters, entrees featuring broiled or grilled meat or fish, sushi and sashimi entrees, special rolls, and an extensive list of by-the-piece sushi, rolls and handrolls. The combinations are many. As with all good sushi places, not everything listed may be available when you go. This is dictated by freshness, the paramount concern when serving raw fish.

We ordered one hot and one cold starter. The hot item was tempura rock shrimp, served in a crisp mound with a creamy and spicy sauce. I've always loved rock shrimp, and they aren't that common on menus. The cold item was "crunch-crunch," spicy salmon spread on crisp-fried wonton skins. It reminded me of a Thai snack I used to eat in New Orleans, sort of an Asian nacho. Both went well with my Kirin beer. I think beer is the best thing to drink with sushi, though I admit I have not acquired a taste for sake.

We moved on to rolls. One was the house specialty, the Isaribi roll. Spicy tuna, salmon, and asparagus make up the inner works, with slices of fresh mango and gold leaf on top. I had never tried sushi with fruit, and the sweetness was a novel counterpoint to the richness of the fish. The other was an exemplary California roll, which my friend said was going to ruin her for supermarket sushi.

The sushi bar had uni (sea urchin) that night, and I pounced on it. It's creamy, foamy, and tastes definitively of the ocean, and it has to be absolutely fresh or you don't want near it. I could have eaten five more, but I stopped at one.

For our main courses, my friend ordered broiled Chilean sea bass (its real name is Patagonian toothfish, but who would order that?), served on a bed of potato noodles and onions, garnished with shredded carrots and a flower. The rich, slightly oily fish came in two filets, brushed with a sweet and savory soy sauce. I ordered a sushi and sashimi combination, featuring generous mounds and slices of tuna, salmon, fluke, flying fish roe and a spicy tuna roll in case I was still hungry. It's a lot of fish, fresh from the water, and some of the prettiest food you'll ever demolish. At least that's what I did with it.

Other menu choices include some 33 sushi items by the piece, about 26 rolls, salmon, chicken and beef teriyaki, dumplings, noodles, ceviche, vegetarian dishes, miso soup, tofu salad, garlic shrimp, panko-breaded oysters, barbecue eel, and large and small sushi, sashimi and chirashi combinations. If you can't make up your mind on sushi, just tell the server "omakase," which means "let the sushi chef decide," and he'll make the choices for you.

There is dessert. The night we were there it was cheesecake, carrot cake and assorted ice creams. We ordered lychee ice cream, but they were out, so we split a bowl of red bean ice cream, which reminds a little of strawberry. It made a light ending to the protein orgy we had just finished.

Does Destin need another sushi restaurant? There are a lot of them, and sushi can be found at some non-Japanese places, to say nothing of some supermarkets. It has finally reached the status of fast food, easily packed in a cooler for a snack at the beach. Kids even eat it, which has to be the last frontier. Isaribi is the latest one, in the heart of old-fashioned Destin. I don't what the word means, but yes, Destin needs it.

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