cookies and code

Today my wife and I walked away from dinner saying, “That was the best meal we’ve had in a long time.” We’ve been going to Banzai Sushi and Thai Restaurant since the first week we moved into Brevard county. A friend of mine, who had grown up in Melbourne, recommended it as one of his favorite Japanese and Thai restaurants in the area. Ever since that first visit we have never had a bad experience being spoiled with amazing food, service, and ambiance. To call Banzai just an eatery doesn’t do it justice, it’s a dining experience. In fact Banzai has kept up its dining traditions when most restaurateurs have been quick to abandon them in these tough economic times. Allow me to share our latest experience.

Upon arriving at their small, but comfortable location, you are immediately greeted by one of the servers and immediately seated at a table; we’ve never had to wait. Within a minute or so, your server arrives with hot towels to clean your hands and small salad bowls with tiny spoons. The salad is a mixture of diced tomatoes and cucumber, shredded carrots, mandarin oranges, and pieces of fried tempura batter. It’s a great balance of sweet and salty and perfect to wet your appetite. We usually like to start with a pot of hot green tea ($1.50 p/person) and a couple ice waters. Once we work our way through the massive list of sushi, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese selections, we’ve never had to wait more than a 10-15 minutes to start our meal. This time around, I ordered one of the most fragrant and tasty green curry dishes with chicken (~$10) and my wife ordered the small green salad (~$3) and the shrimp and vegetable tempura appetizer (~$8). The curry is prepared with coconut millk, bell pepper, bamboo shoots, fresh basil, and red pepper oil in a huge portion; if you like spicy, try the Thai hot for that good kind of spicy. The small green salad comes with your option of ginger or honey ginger dressing on top of iceberg and romaine lettuce, tomato, shredded carrots, and sliced cucumber. The tempura appetizer is big enough to be a meal for a single person coming with three shrimp, onion, broccoli, and sweet potato. If all of this food wasn’t enough, at the end of the meal, the server brings out fried sweet doughnuts, dusted with sugar granules. This time around we didn’t order any sushi, but I have to say that Banzai has some of the best quality sushi for your dollar. Their sushi chefs will make pretty much anything you’d like, even if it’s not on the menu. The rolls are packed full of ingredients and they even have surfboards for larger groups.

Adding to the experience of dining at Banzai, every server in the restaurant is your server. They are all equally friendly and courteous offering help to anyone who needs it. I’m not sure if he’s the manager or owner, but even the man in charge is out and about taking care of his customers, making it a pleasent evening for everyone in the restaurant. What’s probably the best part of the service however, is the facet most people don’t consider, invisibility. Banzai works like a well oiled machine providing its customers with whatever they need, but without them having to ask for it. This breeds the peaceful quiet that I have to believe all of Banzai’s patrons associate with the restaurant.

Banzai Sushi and Thai Restaurant provides a high quality experience for what has become a more reasonable price now-a-days. The quality of food is high and you’ll find yourself eager for your next visit before you even walk out of the door. If you’re looking for an establishment that is just as much about the time you spend there as it is the food, do yourself a favor and give Banzai and shot. I promise you won’t regret it.

Banzai Sushi and Thai Restaurant is located in the Publix plaza on the corner of Lake Washington and Wickham at 3208 Lake Washington Road, Melbourne, FL.

Bucky over at 2ndPlayer.net has been raving about Izziban Sushi for the past few months. Never to be one to turn down the potential for good sushi, we headed over for our typical “short” Friday lunch. My expectations for any new sushi restaurant are usually low, but in the case of Izziban I was definitely not disappointed. In fact, I think Izziban has some of the best sushi I’ve tried in the Orlando area to date.

Located in the shopping plaza with World Market, Izziban has taken over the the space formally occupied by Saucy Bella. The restaurant layout hasn’t changed too much, but the decor is simple and well done; I especially like the collection of designer saki bottles lining the back wall. It’s your typical “wait to be seated” place. We were seated right away, our drink and food orders were taken, and our food was received all within 20 minutes. The lunch menu was a single page, back and front, with a great sampling of dishes. They have a large selection of bento boxes and lunch-sized entrees as well as sushi, sushimi, and roll lunches.

The table ordered a pretty big diversity of items from the lunch menu as well as an order of gyoza (~$5 – grilled pork dumplings). The gyoza was very flavorful and came with a sweet/salty dipping sauce. I ordered hot tea ($1.50) and the Roll Combo A (~$14) which came with 3 different rolls, a choice of soup or salad, and a generous helping of ginger and wasabi. The miso soup could have used some more tofu and seaweed. A couple others tried the salad which came with a nice chunk of pineapple, fried noodles, and a mild ginger dressing. The tuna roll is the typical tuna roll, the spicy salmon roll is made with smoked salmon, cucumber, and spicy masago, and the shrimp roll was made with shrimp tempura, covered in salmon eggs, and topped with mayo. The quality of the fish used in the rolls was excellent; the tuna literally melted in my mouth. I also tried some of the tonkatsu that someone ordered and it was extremely tender; most places fry the pork to “bone dry” perfection, so I was shocked to taste how well it was prepared. I wanted to try their egg sushi as well, but unfortunately I just didn’t have enough room left after finishing my meal. In fact, I can’t believe that I even was able to finish all 3 rolls. If that doesn’t spell tasty then I don’t know what does.

I do wish the pricing at Izziban was a little more affordable for lunch, but all and all, Izziban delivers great sushi and Japanese food. I couldn’t find anything that I tried from the menu that I didn’t like. I was sad to see Saucy Bella go, but I’m really glad to see another great local restaurant take its place. Good call Bucky.

Izziban Sushi is located next to World Market at 1700 West Sand Lake Road, Suite D124, Orlando FL.

My wife and I went out to lunch today to a new teppanyaki/sushi restaurant called Fujiyama Seafood and Steak. We usually end up going to Makotos for teppanyaki (over on Babock), which is a drive, so we were excited to try a place closer to home. I’m always up for trying new places anyway and um … yeah eating, so it wasn’t hard to convince me to go.

The restaurant is located in a strip mall like setting with a cool little entry way that doubles as a waiting room. Inside the restaurant there are about 8+ hibachi style grills which can seat about 8 people per table. The dinnerware they use is some really high quality stuff (no platic soup spoons) and the tables surrounding the grills are made of a finished black stone, so the place has a very cool vibe to it. They also had a sushi bar on the opposite side of the restaurant and daily wine specials, but I didn’t partake in any of those things this time around. When we got there we were 2 of the only 8 people dining, but by the time we left, the place was filling up.

The lunch menu was pretty limited, 2 sushi/sushimi options and 6 teppanyaki options (each of a single choice = shrimp, chicken, steak, etc). I ordered the terryaki chicken (~$7) and my wife got the terryaki steak (~$8). We both also ordered water and hot tea (~$1.25 = green tea). The meal came with a clear broth soup, a salad with ginger dressing, a single grilled shrimp, fried rice, vegetable medley, and your lunch choice. The soup was chicken broth with fresh mushrooms and scallions but nothing special. The salad was very simple, but the dressing was excellent. I liked it even better than the ginger dressing that Makatos made famous. The ginger was not overpowering at all; it tasted extremely fresh as if it was made in house. The shrimp was a shrimp and the veggies were mushrooms, zuchini, and onion (my wife does however like Makotos’ sweet carrots better). The fried rice was made with seafood sauce instead of butter along with the usual egg and soy sauce mixture. The seafood sauce gave the rice a really good taste when cooked into it. The chicken and steak were very good too, not fatty at all, and of a good quality.

The big shocker for the meal were the portion sizes. As many of you know, I eat everything in front of me with a vengeance. Usually when I go for teppanyaki I know I should be taking some home with me, but the box is always empty. At Fujiyama, the portion sizes were just enough for me to be full without feeling like I had eaten too much. For me, this is always a plus. Also, they had saucers for the seafood sauce and ginger sauce which were split down the middle. Every time I got to a teppanyaki restaurant, they always give me a metric ton of sauce that I barely touch and they throw away. This just seemed smart to me.

The wait staff was extremely nice and attentive. We got to one part in the meal when the cook tried to volley a piece of fried egg into my mouth, as a trick for the table, and I got hit the eye, dazed, and knocked my fork off the table. Within a few seconds the manager came over and replaced my fork without me saying a word. Our glasses were always filled and our check came and was taken care very quickly. Overall, I really liked Fujiyama and will be going back whenever I’m in the mood for teppanyaki.

Fujiyama Steak and Seafood is located next to Home Depot at 5000 N Wickham Rd, Melbourne, FL 32940.