REVIEW: TUNA CUTTING EXPERIENCE at SUSHI BY BOU
Sushi By Bou, a speakeasy-style micro-omakase chain known for its 12-course chef menus + dining speed, has a new experience in its arsenal: A monthly Tuna Cutting Experience featuring a 250 lb Bluefin tuna sliced before guests who spoon-scrape its bones, swallow eyeballs + drink sake from its head.
Dining critic Susie Davidson Powell hit it up + finds the experience both a culinary drama and slightly feral.
Tuna Cutting at Sushi By Bou: A Monthly Experience
Basement level at City Beer Hall, 42 Howard Street, Albany, NY I
We like it for: A fun late night out with a drinking crowd. Do not bring your squeamish friends.
Must try: Tuna. (Duh)
Vibe: Set aside the $125 price tag and put any thought of a multi-course tasting dinner out of your mind. This is a high energy, excitable crowd that leans closer to a happy, culinary bro-fest with pretty girls taking airborne sake pours from a shoulder-height tuna head + guys gulping soy-soaked eye balls. The tuna is excellent. But prepare to get intimately involved with all of its body parts.
Sound: Is there music? Probably. Hard to say over the chatter and shrieks of laughter.
THE DISHING REVIEW:
It’s a struggle to put this into words: Where a typical Sushi By Bou experience feels like a dinner date or pre-theatre treat with cocktails, sake flights and delicately composed courses presented as individual sashimi or nigiri, this experience is an entirely different act. And that could be the point. The tuna cutting is theatre, it’s drama, and in some way it’s vaguely feral, as young women in lipstick and heels and young men in baseball caps surge around the spliced carcass taking wooden spoons to its ribs, scraping raw flesh off white bones for bites straight from the source.
But it’s not just that. While friendly staff circulate with trays of freshly sliced tuna meat cut from various quarters, getting a spot at the bar is hard, and somewhat chaotic. With no direction, we weren’t sure whether each part of the bar was a station for one part of the fish; and with most of the guests having come as groups, there are mini crowds egging their own people on with sake shots from the tuna fish head, photo ops kissing the fish lips, and a keen quest to be one of two people chosen to swallow the enormous tuna eyes. Dosed in soy and ponzu, each eye is poured into a glass and slugged down in one like a shot. The resulting retch-and-heave is not entirely surprising, but for those of us who filmed the spectacle—and that’s everyone—it’s a curious soundtrack when played back.
It is undeniably fun entertainment and on arrival, guests are served a glass of sake and a trio of nigiri before the cutting action begins. That’s when a 250lb Bluefin tuna is carried in on a stretcher, heaved over the counter and dispatched with massive knives before a whooping crowd—(yes, it feels a little like ‘Lord of The Flies’ when the marooned kids killed a pig)—until the fish head is upended on one end, the tail fin anchored in a pot at the other. Once the torso is dispatched and customers have scraped it clean, the chef holds up the rib cage like a car grill for a photo op and begins the art of carving each section into neat columns to be sliced into sashimi categorized by fat content and served in bamboo boats. The three most familiar cuts are akami the ruby-red lean back loin, chutoro, the semi-fatty striated belly and back, and otoro, the heavily marbled, ultra-fatty belly that eats like butter. But there are other cuts too like kama, the rich, tender, and intensely flavorful bony collar of the fish, or hoho-niku (cheek meat) and noten (top of head.) It’s hard to say who got those, since we couldn’t get prise our way in, but if you want it it’s available.
Were we full? Yes, mostly because we paced ourselves and enjoyed each cut as well as a tuna hand roll and tuna nigiri, though the rice was still warm and not compressed enough to stick.
Eating masses of tuna is a rich and weighty affair on stomach and gut. (And to the group of young men who put away tray after tray, I’m curious how you felt the next day.) One guests noted she attended a prior tuna cutting with less people and they felt they ate more—not because there was insufficient tuna this time, but because it took longer to navigate so many more guests. The venue still had a side of tuna left which must go into regular sushi service, so the $125 price tag feels steep for a 2-hour event, but it’s inclusive of tax and tip, and you won’t leave hungry.
Who’s it for? For the tuna lover, or a bunch of friends looking for a culinary experience, this is a treat. Those hoping for a refined dinner experience should stick to the Sushi By Bou omakase because this isn’t it.
Parking: Street or municipal parking lots.
Nearby: Upstairs is the City Beer Hall with Blu Pizza. Recommended close by: 1. Jack’s Oyster House (open all day with $1 oysters at the bar) 2. Viva Empanadas (excellent menu + bar open for lunch and dinner until 9 p.m. ) 3. Wellington’s Restaurant + Bar inside The Renaissance Hotel 4. The Pearl Street Diner (nothing fancy, exactly what you’d expect.) 5. Izakaya Kinko (next door to the bakery + open for dinner in the basement level of 60 State Street) 6. Emmanual Thai 7. The Hollow 8. dp Brasserie + Yono’s both inside the Hampton Inn. 9. McGeary’s Irish Bar (popular, casual) 10. The Olde English Pub at Quackenbush Square
