Fare, feel make Hiro 88 a hit

A colleague swears he'll never eat at a restaurant with a number in its name. He says those places sound pretentious — unlike, say, Burger King or Dairy Queen.

His name-based discrimination means he's missing out on one of the best restaurants to open in Omaha this year: Hiro 88.

The sushi, Japanese and Chinese restaurant on the Old Market's fringe is a bigger, more urbane version of northwest Omaha's Hiro Sushi.

Milton Yin, the chef and owner of both, estimates he spent $1.75 million to launch the new restaurant in the jLofts building near 13th and Jackson Streets in April.

The black-on-black lunch, dinner and late-night spot has a modern, big-city energy with a calming Zen undercurrent: high-backed banquettes, surprisingly comfy S-shaped molded plastic chairs, twisted black metal chandeliers, paper lanterns-turned-art, ornately carved wooden vestibule doors and a giant cross-legged Buddha sculpture overlooking the low couches in the lounge. There's something about the place that makes you want to put on fancy shoes and sip some sake.

But Hiro 88 is much more than a stylish place to have a drink. It's also a phenomenally good place to eat.

The new Hiro has the same menu as the original: sushi, hot Japanese dishes and Chinese fare, a range that makes it amenable to groups even when not everyone's up for eel or octopus.

On visits in late May and early June, we found care, quality ingredients and great flavor on every section of the menu.

Asian barbecued short ribs, served as an appetizer with green onion, had fatty oomph, grilled sizzle and a teriyaki tang. (Yin told me later he makes them by bathing paper-thin slivers of chuck roast in a marinade with pineapple and kiwi for 24 hours before grilling.)

Salads were cold and simple: fresh mixed greens in chilled glass bowls with sesame dressing (thick, brown, rich, sweet and most excellent) or a less-successful carrot-ginger slurry

Soups were hot and enchanting. I'm not sure which I preferred — the peppery, full-bodied hot-and-sour or the pleasantly mild miso (made with fermented white and red soybean paste).

You can order sushi from a checklist menu, but combinations on the main menu offer more variety for the money if you're not sharing.

The platter I tried at lunch was beautiful, fresh and satisfying. The sushi and sashimi combination always involves two kinds of maki (the seaweed-paper-wrapped rolls most of us think of as sushi), four pieces of nigiri (raw fish on top of finger-sized pillows of sushi rice) and six pieces of sashimi (precisely cut seafood, sans rice).

The kinds of seafood you get will depend on the day and the chef. It's omakase — Japanese for “chef's choice” — with a fixed price (about $22 with soup or salad).

The chef that day must have been thinking about the beach. At the center of the wide rectangular plate, slices of supple orange salmon, meaty red tuna, modest white fluke (belted with a bit of green shiso leaf) and slightly oily yellowtail seemed to be sunning themselves on cushions of perfectly seasoned short-grain sushi rice.

Smaller cuts of tuna and salmon lay on shiso or lemon slices in the shade of a banana leaf standing upright like a spiked surfboard.

Scored strips of bumpy octopus rested like inflatable rafts between a lemon slice and an orange half carved to resemble a setting sun. Creamy-crunchy California rolls (crab, avocado and cucumber) and spicy tuna rolls (mildly spiced minced tuna with crunchy tempura flakes) curled up like napping pets near puddles of wasabi and pickled ginger.

Everything was fresh. The yellowtail was revelatory. And I really loved how the garnishes imparted flavor on contact — hints of orange and lemon on the octopus and that little lemony explosion of shiso on the fluke.

A la carte sushi rolls were tasty, too, though not quite as creatively presented. I liked the Firecracker roll with its tail-poking-out tempura shrimp, spicy minced tuna, cucumber and avocado. And I thought the Husker roll a perfect Omaha-Japanese fusion: tempura beef tenderloin, asparagus, cream cheese and eel sauce, even better with a little dab of wasabi.

The Snow White Chicken from the Chinese menu was a satisfying stir-fry of slivered chicken, snow peas, carrots and other vegetables tossed in a light and flavorful Chinese white sauce. Steam radiated from its wide white serving bowl.

The plank salmon from the Japanese kitchen menu was the best I've ever had: a thick steak, skin side down, grilled and served on a neat oval plank of blackened mesquite. The fish was beautifully caramelized on top, moist but opaque inside, full of sweet and smoky flavor. It was surrounded by an ingenious red-brown sauce that tasted sweet, tart and mysterious: berries? tamarind? sesame oil?

Yin later told me he's been working on that dish for a decade. The sauce is a raspberry balsamic dressing he originally intended for salads but tried, on a whim, with the fish. It's truly terrific, served with steamed rice and a stunningly simple salad I've since imitated at home: just-peeled Fuji apple and English cucumber chunks dressed in sweetened rice vinegar.

A pork fillet involved crisp panko-breaded tenderloin, cut in strips and served with a terrific dipping sauce that tasted like gingerbread-meets-Kansas-City-barbecue. Oddly, the dish came with a sour-tasting scoop of mashed potatoes (unnecessary, as there was also a side of rice) and a few bits of underseasoned steamed carrots and broccoli.

House-made frozen desserts were better than expected. The chocolate ice cream tasted like someone had shattered an entire bar of the good stuff in our little cup. It reminded me of a very good mousse I had in Paris.

Though a pink grapefruit sorbet tasted too much of bitter pith for me, a raspberry sorbet captured that berry's brilliance. And an orange-rhubarb sherbet was a seasonal wonder — another dish I'll try making at home.

Though it certainly felt cool to be there, I never felt the too-cool-for-you sentiment my colleague presumed.

I chalk that up in part to gracious service. We were warmly greeted, promptly seated and tended by personable and informed folks in black. The tables were set with disposable pull-apart chopsticks, but forks were always offered.

Though salads, soups and appetizers arrived all at once one busy weeknight, course pacing wasn't a problem on two other visits. And we left with toothpicks, Andes mints (rare these days) and sincere-seeming invitations to return.

The clientele also perhaps made this sleek place seem more approachable: sandal-clad tourists and young parents with kids, suit-wearing businessmen, downtown dwellers in shirt sleeves and summer dresses, and folks with a median age I'd ballpark at about 42.

Yin said he chose Hiro 88 because eight's a lucky number in Chinese: “Double eight, double luck.”

I think Omaha's doubly lucky to have this new Hiro, whatever its name.

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Contact the writer:

444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com

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