When the eatery What Crepe? on Liberty closed last year, its kitchen had a unique feature: a crepe-making station that was like a little performance-art space. Nick Ma says:
“As soon as we saw the set-up, that was it. It took me about two hours to decide what to do.” He’d been wanting to offer Japanese-style skewers, or yakitori, for a long time, but, like crepes, yakitori takes special equipment. They’re sold in little alley snack bars in Japan and Korea, where part of the appeal is watching them sizzle on the grill.
It was a surprisingly easy task to swap out the crepe machine for a special electric grill.
Nagomi Sushi Downtown opened in December, though Ma says he’s still in a “soft opening,” mainly because he’s waiting for his liquor license to arrive: “Sake and skewers go hand in hand.” As soon as the sake gets the green light, he’ll bring in the bar stools and flesh out the bar that already exists in back. He wanted warmth and comfort and simplicity, so he replaced What Crepe’s busy retro-mod furnishings with rough-sawn hardwood tabletops and a lot of rustic barn wood. “I don’t want people to be overwhelmed. I don’t want this to feel like expensive city life. Just have a comfortable meal–that’s it.” (If the glittery Belle Epoque chandeliers seem to contradict that, they’re left over from What Crepe and will soon be replaced.)
Ma, forty-five, opened his first Nagomi Sushi, now Nagomi Sushi North, on the edge of North Campus seven years ago with his brother. “Just call him Kim,” he says, after some back-and-forth about whether to use his English or Korean name and whether Kim was the family or a given name. “What do you call him?” we finally asked. “Me? I call him dongkang. I would never call him by his name,” says Ma, amused. “Would you call your mother by her first name? I don’t. I call her [the Korean equivalent of] Mom.” (Within the family, Ma himself is hyung.) Kim does a lot of the cooking. Ma, in addition to running two restaurants, has a job as a golf pro at Miles of Golf.
Though the brothers are Korean, there’s a lot of intermixing between the food cultures of Japan and Korea–their parents owned a Japanese restaurant in Seoul when they were growing up. At Nagomi Downtown, “We have the traditional teriyaki and sushi menu”–a duplicate of Nagomi North’s–“but not everyone wants that kind of food,” Ma says. Yakitori skewers cost about one-fifth as much as a typical restaurant entree. Prices range from $1.50 for an asparagus skewer to $7 for rib eye steak, and in between are some of the more interesting ones. Waiter Quentin volunteers his two skewer recommendations: pork belly and bacon-wrapped garlic. Probably in the you-have-to-be-Asian-or-a-restaurant-critic category is one called “chicken knees.” Ma explains that it’s pretty much what it sounds like: “cartilage.” He also translates a few other unfamiliar words on the menu: okonomiyaki, a seafood pancake (here, he says, they make them Hiroshima style, with less flour, and more seafood and veggies). Takoyaki is a fried octopus ball. And on the outside signage, that unfamiliar word ijakaya is a Japanese word for “a place you eat and drink,”–Wikipedia calls it a “type of informal gastropub.”
Though Nagomi North is a popular spot, he and Quentin admit they got thrown into the deep water during January’s restaurant week. Nagomi Downtown had been open only a few weeks and had not even advertised its opening yet was slammed by unexpected crowds. Ma jumps at the opportunity to get an apology on record. He lets Quentin explain: “The level of service wasn’t there. If one ticket gets lost, then 300 orders behind it end up waiting.”
Nagomi Sushi Downtown, 241 E. Liberty, 369-3272. Mon.-Sat. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sun. noon-9 p.m. nagomiannarbor.com
