Ikesu: Japanese for Tasty

Actually, ikesu is Japanese for fish tank. But we ate at a great ikesu restaurant in Nagasaki last week.

The restaurant, whose name, loosely translated, is Jumbo Fishtank, is located inside of the otherwise thoroughly uninspiring Nagasaki View Hotel. The hotel is on one of the main thoroughfares and easily reachable via streetcar or taxi (directions in Japanese here).

When you walk into the restaurant, you are greeted by a huge, U-shaped counter that surrounds the three huge pools and a very large aquarium. Taken together, the pools are the size of a small swimming pool. When we were there, hamachi, flounder, and squid were swimming around in the main pools (the squid isolated in their own blue plastic box—we later found out this was because they are very sensitive and require more oxygen than the rest of the fish).

Between the pool and the large glass aquarium is a smallish tank, full of shellfish. I saw shrimp and abalone, but I’m sure there were others in there as well.

Finally, the large glass tank contains smaller fish: aji, kinki and various other delights.

The menu is entirely in Japanese, but pointing and grunting would get you pretty far, especially since almost everything on the menu is swimming around in front of you.

After you ordered, one of the chefs would grab a net, swoop up the fish you had asked for and would then “prepare” it. For most of the fish, this consisted of quickly fileting the fish, plating it and then having it sent to your table, sometimes still gasping. It’s a little weird, since these days fishmongering happens well outside of the customer’s view, but the results were delicious.

We had four or five different dishes — I’ve got pics of each and will post a link here when I’ve uploaded them. Highlights were the aji (mackarel) and squid. We literally ate the whole fish. The squid, which we ordered as sashimi, was served on top of its own, still twitching, head and tentacles. Once we had finished the sashimi, the waitress returned to ask whether we would like the rest of the squid grilled or fried. We had it fried. It was deliciously tender.

In the same vein, the two aji we ate, also as sashimi, were served next to their heads and backbones — the eyes still bright and clear. The bodies were then deep fried and we ate them like you might eat a potato chip. Delicious!

The restaurant was pretty busy. We were there during Golden Week, a series of unrelated Japanese holidays that happen to fall consecutively, when almost everyone in Japan is on vacation. The service ranged from excellent to passable, depending on which of the three or four servers was attending to us at any given time.

Ikesu dining isn’t cheap — the squid set us back almost $40. The whole meal, including beer, umeshu and a really cool horizontal sake tasting flight was about $80 a person. I can only imagine what a similar meal would cost in Tokyo. But I highly recommend it, both as an experience and for the taste.

An annotated cameraphone panorama follows — read the captions, but then click here to see a larger version. It came out incredibly well. I stitched it together using autostitch, a great little program from a University of British Columbia grad student:

Posted by pmk at May 6, 2005 4:48 AM | TrackBack