O ya's decor is chic but unpretentious, and its food is astonishing.
(David Kamerman/Globe Staff)
Sauce
A few weeks ago, some friends went to a sushi place in Boston - a good one, too. They had a wonderful time for not a lot of money. A few of them left wondering how on earth they could ever go back to joe-schmo sushi. The fish at this new place is so fresh. Someone in that group had even vowed to renounce sushi until those happy memories evaporated. A month later, they hadn't.
So when he was invited to dinner at o ya, a Japanese place more or less across from South Station, he accepted with only half his heart - the "OK, I love my friends" half. By the time the warm eel arrived with its basil and special kabayaki sauce - somewhere toward the middle of things - he couldn't remember the other restaurant. This small, attentively run place had rocked his world, stolen his heart (both halves), and emptied his wallet.
O ya is the kind of restaurant where you're a little richer for leaving a little poorer. (Don't pay attention to that aggravating lowercasing.) The food is not food. The food is art. Every piece should come with a gilt frame around it -- and you'd probably want to eat that, too. The flavors are intriguingly strange without being full-on weird. The tuna comes tataki-style, seared, with smoky pickled onions and truffle oil, tomatoes, salt, and aioli. Tempuraed shiso leaf is paired with a slab of lobster tail, with ponzu aioli and charred tomato.
The Onsen egg is slow-cooked and served with truffle salt, homemade pickled garlic, and dashi sauce in a cute piece of pottery. The Santa Barbara spot prawn served with white soy sauce and torched garlic butter is tender and has an immaculate finish. Kohada baby mackerel is paired with pureed olives and a spiky shiso salsa verde. And the non-fish dishes - a "petit" pork chop, say, or tea-brined pork ribs, citrus-and-tea-brined chicken wings (they were very round and stuffed with shiitake and cabbage and came atop some kimchee), fried rectangles of zucchini - are knockouts, too. That kind of balance is rare: it's sushi; it's soul food.
It's not simply that the food looks pretty, either. There's alchemy in the pairings. The harmonies are intense, vivid, surprising. (Can you put a frame around a taste?) You will cry. You will moan. You will hold future booty callers to higher standards of satisfaction and imagination. Just a few items in, you feel you're in hands masterful enough to start eating stuff you don't even enjoy, like foie gras nigiri (with Venezuelan cocoa pulp). Dinner here is an authentic, expertly guided gustatory safari.
The South End's Oishii, with its high-design cave-like spaces, has earned lots of acclaim for its imaginative leaps, too. But Oishii knows it's great. And, in return, you're supposed to know it's great - which it is. There's no pretense of showmanship at o ya. It's not dinner at the Batcave. It's basically a chic, somewhat unassuming hole in the wall. It's also been open for months and, alarmingly, there are still empty seats. It could be the location: a tiny street in the Leather District with barely any signs. It could certainly be the prices - there's very little here for under $10; there's very little here bigger than two fingers. As one delighted but wary o ya diner warned on Yelp.com, "Do not come here famished or bear the financial consequences."
And yet people with money in this town are throwing their cash at all kinds of mediocre, overrated restaurants (the throwers and thrown-at know who they are) - and they're enduring ludicrous waits to do so. O ya, meanwhile, is just the sort of place cosmopolitan folks say they wish Boston had more of. "San Francisco and Chicago don't have that problem." Well, problem solved. And the solution tastes outrageously good.
O ya, 9 East St., 617-654-9900. Entrées $8 (some nigiri) - $159 (Wagyu beef); sakes by the bottle $16-$136.
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