Tempura

Today's lesson: Modern-style crispy tempura frying.* Why tempura fried food tastes so good: The thin, almost translucent batter transfers heat from the oil immediately into the food. The juices from the food turn to steam and do the real cooking. The steam keeps the fats from entering the food. The result is light and delicate fried food.* Advantages: The crispy thin batter contains a small portion of the fat found in traditional heavy frying. The thin batter also allows the flavor of the vegetable, fish, shellfish or poultry as well as the spices and seasonings to shine through.

Kyodai bills itself as Baltimore's only rotating sushi bar. The concept is simple, if at first unintentionally amusing: You sit at the bar with your napkin, chopsticks, soy, wasabi and ginger. The sushi-tenders roll up various concoctions, cut them, usually into quarters, plate them, and place them on a shiny silver conveyor belt that chugs along the inside perimeter of the bar. And as they pass, you reach up and pluck down plates that look right for you. No menu. No wondering what it might look like.

Q: Whenever I make tempura, it comes out much greasier than at Japanese restaurants. Am I using the wrong oil or a bad recipe? Thanks for helping. A: There is nothing worse than biting into a beautiful golden brown piece of tempura and having what seems like a cup of warm oil dribble into your mouth. There is no oil on this planet that would make that a good experience - but it's not the type of oil that causes the problem. Most oils are fine to use for tempura; I personally like canola because it doesn't impart any flavor to the food fried in it. The key to grease-free tempura lies in the temperature of the oil, which should be between 340 degrees and 360 degrees.

On a busy night at Sushi Sono , which by many accounts is every night, the wait for a table in the cramped entrance area, even with a reservation, can be an exercise in patience. Formalities and niceties are mostly dispensed with, and the service on a busy night can border on the hectoring. The idea that you could maintain a state of quiet contemplation in Sushi Sono's hectic dining room is laughable. None of this matters. The reason to make the trip to Lake Kittamaqundi, to put up with the confusing signs and alienating ingress into Wincopin Circle, is that Sushi Sono might just have the best sushi in the four-county area.

Don't let the name fool you. Edo Sushi, the new Japanese restaurant in Timonium, offers much more than raw fish on seasoned rice. Traditional casseroles, teriyaki, tempura and noodle dishes are all on the menu. About the only thing you can't get here is a Japanese beer; Edo Sushi doesn't have a liquor license. (The restaurant is happy for you to bring your own alcohol.)This is a sunny, cheerful little dining room with lots of blond wood -- shiny and bright as a new penny. Kimono-clad waitresses carrying the sushi chef's pretty creations glide from table to table.

The best value restaurants from Food & Wine magazine's 2008 lists (in alphabetical order): 1. Kau Kee Restaurant, Hong Kong 2. Kefi, New York City 3. Kiosko Universal, Barcelona, Spain 4. Legendary Noodle, Vancouver, Canada 5. Les Cocottes, Paris 6. Love Supreme, Sydney, Australia 7. Open Colonna, Rome 8. Refuel, London 9. Taberna Laredo, Madrid, Spain 10. Tempura Mikawa, Tokyo

The Geisha Roll ($11.95) at Chiyo Sushi in Mount Washington got me. I was taken by its avocado bottom, enthralled by its chopped salmon salad middle, swept away by its lotus root top. The Dragon Roll ($9.95) also turned my head. This sleek combination of crab and cucumber on the inside and eel and tobiko (fish roe) on the outside was fresh and appealing. The Orioles Roll ($11.95), a mixture of white tuna, tempura flakes and sweet hot sauce wrapped with salmon, avocado and tobiko, had its moments in part because the Orioles had won the day I visited the restaurant.

Tokyo Sushi, a tiny restaurant tucked into the quiet part of a Glen Burnie strip shopping center, serves up tasty sushi at even tastier prices.The food is excellent -- the tempura is the best I've had in northern Anne Arundel County -- the service is great, and the lunch prices are unbelievably inexpensive.A famished friend and I arrived at 1 p.m. on a weekday and found the restaurant empty except for its owner and his family sitting in the back, chatting over lunch.The restaurant, which opened Nov. 3, has been building up a clientele, but its location doesn't make that easy.

Upstairs in the dining room at Hana Japanese Restaurant in East Baltimore is a small flower bed. Unlike 95 percent of carryout restaurants I've ventured into, this one actually contains living plants. It's only appropriate, I suppose, for a restaurant named after the Japanese word for flower. But the live flowers confirmed my initial impression walking in that Hana is a restaurant that really cares. Hana opened about 10 months ago and is not related to Sushi Hana in Towson. This one sits between two beauty-supply shops on a busy block of East Monument Street abutting the Johns Hopkins medical complex.

When Chong Im and Chong Won So moved to Glen Burnie 15 years ago, the Korean-American community there was virtually nonexistent, so they opened Peking Garden restaurant at 7523 Ritchie Highway and served Chinese food.But as more Korean-Americans settled in Glen Burnie, the couple slowly began adding Korean dishes to the menu. About six months ago, the metamorphosis was complete.The Sos added a sushi bar and new tables with built-in hot plates for Korean-style barbecue, introduced a new menu with Korean, Japanese and Chinese fare, and changed the restaurant's name to Blue Garden.

The Geisha Roll ($11.95) at Chiyo Sushi in Mount Washington got me. I was taken by its avocado bottom, enthralled by its chopped salmon salad middle, swept away by its lotus root top. The Dragon Roll ($9.95) also turned my head. This sleek combination of crab and cucumber on the inside and eel and tobiko (fish roe) on the outside was fresh and appealing. The Orioles Roll ($11.95), a mixture of white tuna, tempura flakes and sweet hot sauce wrapped with salmon, avocado and tobiko, had its moments in part because the Orioles had won the day I visited the restaurant.

In an article in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience, the way you choose a sushi bar - whether to stay with your old standby or to keep looking - is used as a "classic problem" of the "exploration/exploitation dilemma." It's nice to know your problems are classic. Joss Cafe & Sushi Bar, which opened a few months ago downtown, is my kind of sushi restaurant. The only thing it doesn't have is a bar for happy hour, for a night in the future when I might want to sneak in by myself for a quick bite after work.

The best value restaurants from Food & Wine magazine's 2008 lists (in alphabetical order): 1. Kau Kee Restaurant, Hong Kong 2. Kefi, New York City 3. Kiosko Universal, Barcelona, Spain 4. Legendary Noodle, Vancouver, Canada 5. Les Cocottes, Paris 6. Love Supreme, Sydney, Australia 7. Open Colonna, Rome 8. Refuel, London 9. Taberna Laredo, Madrid, Spain 10. Tempura Mikawa, Tokyo

Imagine the perfect little neighborhood sushi restaurant, and a place much like Kiku Sushi is sure to spring to mind. The perfect restaurant starts, of course, with the perfect location, and bustling Light Street in Federal Hill certainly qualifies. You wouldn't want your fantasy restaurant in a strip mall. You wouldn't want it to be part of a chain, either, and Kiku isn't. The single location is owned by Tori Yang and run by his family. Your fantasy restaurant would be small, but a clever layout would make it seem spacious.

As 2006 kicks off, a couple of Baltimore hangouts are hoping to combine the old with the new. In the basement of the Belvedere Hotel, Kamikazis has just opened where Kobe Teppan closed last November. It, too, is a sushi/hibachi Japanese restaurant. And it, too, is hoping to hook B-more's late-night crowd. But Kamikazis manager Hillary Herlehy says she and owner James C. Foster hope to ratchet things up a notch. To start with, Herlehy says they've tried to give the place a slightly more "energetic feel."

The small Edo Sushi chain of restaurants, which started in Timonium in 1997, has ventured out of the suburbs with its latest incarnation, located in the Inner Harbor. The fourth Edo restaurant, on the second floor of Harborplace, opened in August, next to the considerably less elegant Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Like the other Edo restaurants, this one doesn't make much of an impression from the outside. But by now, the owners have proven themselves experts at taking tiny strip-mall stores and creating serene interiors that somehow seem spacious.

The Orient is a bit misleading. From its name, one might think this downtown Towson restaurant offers cuisine from across a continent.It does not.It offers a great number of Chinese dishes and a sampling of Japanese fare. There is an attractive sushi bar separate from the dining room.Except for a mixed appetizer tempura plate, my husband and I stuck to Chinese dishes on a recent visit to The Orient. And except for that tempura, what we had was mostly run-of-the-mill. At higher than run-of-the-mill prices.

Sushi restaurants in shopping centers come and go in a blink of the eye. Usually the only one you need to know about is the one in your neighborhood. But the reader was insistent. Not only was the new Yamato Sushi better than the sushi place that was in that location before, but, she told me, it was the very best in the area. That I can't say, but the small restaurant does have lots of appeal. Its fish is beautifully fresh, and the combination plates of sushi and sashimi (sliced raw fish without the rice)