Greetings food enthusiasts and Battlefood addicts! I apologize for the lengthy wait between updates. Unfortunately, despite a six week pseudo-sabbatical from school, Napoleon apparently did not feel the need to publish any reviews. We gave thought to taking her out back Ol' Yeller-style, but apparently there are laws against these sort of things. In any case, I've come back to sate your hunger for the best that Philly has to offer.
Today we're looking at a Japanese restaurant on 12th and Walnut called Aki. One of our dear friends has taken a job there as a hostess, and so we thought we'd make sure the place didn't close down and force our friend into the unemployment queue. Aki had a great happy hour, with half-priced starters, beers, and sushi rolls, so we paid our friend a visit and ate a cheap meal, all while enjoying global warming.
Napoleon had three dishes, including edamame, chicken yakitori, and avocado salad. I had bites of each, and I'll briefly cover them. Ed's mommy is pretty standard. I'm sooooo glad we spent $2 on un-shucked soy beans. Seriously, though, I'll never understand this concept. Anyone who orders edamame is a chump. Sorry, Napoleon. The chicken had a tasty sweet and tangy sauce ("house sauce" AKA soy sauce + honey), but the chicken was horribly over-cooked. I'll repeat my thoughts from the Cava review: chicken skewers will always lead to overcooked chicken. Finally Napoleon struck gold by getting the avocado salad. The sauce was perfect, and the avocado was fresh and creamy. I only wish there was more of it.
Avocado Salad
Chicken Yakitori
I feel like I was very picky in choosing my dishes, yet I also was disappointed to some degree. My starters included duck spring rolls, gyoza, and soft-shell crab tempura. The duck spring rolls are the only dish I would go back to Aki to sample. They were perfectly crispy, the duck was tender, and the accompanying sauce was cleverly (or cheese-ily, depending on how you look at it) based on duck sauce. The gyoza, which means dumpling in Japanese, was a pork dumpling served with soy sauce. This was spot on, but lacked the bite of charred pasta shells I love in my dumplings. It was another good dish, to be fair, but I can get the same flavor from those Costco pot-stickers. Finally, the soft-shell crab tempura was oily and salty, and, in an egregious mistake, paired with soy sauce. Someone back there in Aki royally messed this one up. What were they thinking? "Hmmm, you know what'd be great? Let's make the tempura as salty as possible, and then serve it with a sauce whose flavor is primarly salty!" [licks finger and points it in air] "Championship!"
Duck Spring Rolls
Gyoza
Soft-Shell Crab Tempura
To wrap up: Aki provided cheap eats (during a happy hour) with mediocre flavor. Get the spring duck rolls and the avocado salad. Watch out for Ed's Mommy, chump.
Rating: 3.3/5.0 chumps
1 comment:
Pol Potsticker here. Excellent post! I laughed at the Ed's Mommy joke, I cried at the hypernatremia inducing tempura/sauce pairing (though to be honest, its translucency in the picture makes it look suspiciously like tempura sauce rather than soy), I laugh/cried at the thought of mercy-killing Napoleon.
Couple comments: I'm with you 100% on the edamame. Good stuff, but when I see it on the menu for $5, and know that you can buy huge bagfuls of the stuff for a couple of bucks, I can't help but snicker. Also, some of these starters do look pretty tasty, but I want to point out that the real winner at Aki are the rolls! Especially the 2 for $8.50 lunch deals. Mmmmmm!
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