country station

2140 mission street @ sycamore, between 17th & 18th. yes, it's slightly sketchy.

motivation: attempting to impress my italian brother f, visiting from the old country, in sf for new year's. seeing as how f has acquired the taste for sushi (it almost runs in the family!) pinky and i took him out to country station. this is probably my all-time favorite sushi restaurant in the mission, and possibly beyond. the immediate neighborhood sucks but they're moving soon anyway (see previous post). but that edginess is part of what makes this such a fantastic experience. the decor is schizophrenic, the music punk, and the chefs anarchists. or at least they look like they are. and the food, the food is sublime. for a great price! but i'm getting ahead of myself.

we settled ourselves in at whichever table we wanted, because half of san francisco was out of town on vacation, and it was a wednesday. f immediately noticed the dancing james brown (moment of silence) and mishmash of textbooks and discarded novels on the rickety bookshelf. handy in case your date is boring. the holiday lights stay up year-round, as do the expired event fliers and random polaroids. since f brought his camera like a good tourist, you all even get to see a shot of the window.
gorgeous, yes? right. what you can't see in this shot is the tattered menus and specials written on pieces of cardboard. there are various clever innuendos and misspellings that make for hours of entertainment.

so, on to the food. we had the agedashi tofu as winter comfort food to start. the lightening roll was an excellent combination of avocado, shrimp, kani and tobiko, that stayed light. beauty and the beast added papaya for a new kind of fresh; the tokyo roll maki simply allowed the flavors of the salmon and avo to come through. for nigiri we had the katsuo (meaty & smoky), tako, and aji--all with shiso, which gets up into your nose and opens things up. f snaked both pieces of maguro so i never got to try it but he insisted it was good enough to eat two of (bastard). pinky convinced him to try the uni which had a beautiful presentation with thin slices of cucumber on top. they said it had overtones of cashew. yum! f's only complaint was that the rolls were cut too big to fit into his mouth.

fantastic quality, reasonable prices. it's not cheap, but you definitely get what you pay for here. oh, and i forgot to mention flirtability. it's got tons of potential. on busier nights you get to chatting with the other diners that you're elbow-to-elbow with. the staff take their job pretty seriously but i've seen them loosen up and have a beer before. in my opinion, it's a very good place to bring a date and make your own sparks.

lastly, you can usually fill your belly up pretty well here at country station, but we had to jet on out of there to get to marga gomez's sold-out show, so i know that i'll be back to get my fix again soon.

itadakimasu!