My friend, Jessica, is cool as hell

Somehow she managed to score an invitation for two free dinners at the Grand Opening Party of a new Japanese restaurant on 48th Street here in the Big Apple. So Monday night we strolled into Aoki and proceeded to enjoy some good times. (Remember, free tastes better!)

The booth where we sat was pretty cool. The backs were made of clear Plexiglas and the table was made out of burnished metal with a clear top. Even better, we were seated next to the all-important "water element"...a wall of textured stone with water cascading gently down. I wanted to stick my fingers in it several times, but Jessica swore she wouldn't pull me out if I fell in, so I declined to potentially embarrass myself (I wouldn't have embarrassed her...she would just have folded her napkin politely, put it on the table and walked out...and spent the next week laughing at me.)

The rest of the decor was kind of...eclectic. In the front it was like the lounge area of a nightclub with velvet covered sofas and low tables to dine from...in the middle the chairs and tables were made of planked wood. To the side there was a huge, wildly colorful mural (not the understated depiction rendered here) of part of a classic Samurai warrior's face. In the back was a normal looking sushi bar. The other non-mural-adorned walls were red, water-covered or frosted glass (depending on which way you were facing). The ceiling was red and off-white and had huge wooden beams that I think were supposed to resemble the interior of a traditional Japanese farmhouse (like Gasho of Japan where my dad and I like to go for our lunch/dinners out).

It was more than a little weird, but hey, there was free food involved. I can put up with a little weird for that.

But not a LOT of weird.

In the middle of our meal, Jessica and I were conversing about acupuncture and sushi and polygamy (don't ask), when all of a sudden the music (which seemed to be the result of a bad iPod playlist) turned demonic. Seriously. It was like listening to a heavy metal album backwards. And it was LOUD. And although it caused Jess and me to freeze mid-fork-to-mouth, NO ONE ELSE SEEMED TO NOTICE! We kept looking around at the waitstaff, the owners, the other guests...everyone was just chatting away like nothing unusual was going on. We were shocked. And concerned. Were we the only ones being spoken to by the demonic music? Or were we surrounded by a crazed bunch of Satanists who used free food to lure us into a sacrificial trap?!

Apparently we were the only ones who could hear the demons, but (thank goodness) we were not surrounded by Satanists. At least not the sacrificing kind. No one attacked us during or after our meal (unless you count the hostess/owner with the zebra print boots who accosted us during the shrimp and vegetable tempura and wanted to know if we were happy with everything).

We discovered belatedly that the drinks were ordered were comped with our meal. We were both disappointed because we would have ordered something more expensive had we known. Jess barely touched her very heady plum wine (which is just as well because she had to go to work the next day), but I sucked down my Lover's Punch like it was fruit juice. Since I didn't even get a mild buzz, I think it may well have been.

Overall the food rating pimped out as follows (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest):
Seaweed salad: 3 (my first time intentionally eating seaweed...not as bad as I thought, but I doubt that I would do it again)

Calamari salad: 4 (yummy, but a tiny bit tough)




Shrimp and vegetable tempura: 4.5 (would have been a perfect 5 except it was too bland without the soy sauce)

Sushi: 4 (I'm going by Jessica's happiness on this one...I don't believe in eating meat that isn't cooked) . We totally did not get Hello Kitty sushi, so that bangs their rating down a few notches.

Shrimp Tempura roll: 3.5 (more seaweed...and I couldn't figure out how to eat it with chopsticks, so I made a lovely mess eating with my fingers - no forks were present or proffered)

Shrimp and Chicken teriyaki: 4 (the chicken was a little bland, but the shrimp were yummy)

Sashimi: 3.75 (once again raw food rating based on Jess' happiness)

Yes, we did have that much food. And we didn't even get everything they wanted to give us. We were supposed to have started with miso soup. I skipped it because I hate miso soup, but Jessica skipped it because there was just too much food coming. We planned to skip the salads as well, but they were no less than foisted upon us by the waiter who insisted that since they were included with the meal that we should have them. (FOISTED upon us, I tell you!) We didn't eat all that food. We couldn't eat all that food. But we felt appropriately bad about it because our middle-class sensibilities made us regret wasting food.

When they dropped off the bill, they let us know that they entire evening would have cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $166 had we paid for it. We filled out a short evaluation about the food, ambiance and service (they misspelled "excellenect", so they lost points for that), left a tip for The Insistent Waiter and wandered out. All in all a fine deal, even though we didn't get a dessert selection. I would have gladly traded my shrimp tempura roll or seaweed salad for a dish of green tea ice cream (but nobody asked me, which is partially why I'm not in charge of anything...of course, it's also why I'm not wearing zebra print stiletto heel boots, either, so maybe this is a blessing in disguise...)