Restaurant: Blue Ribbon Sushi
Location: 1079-1001 Monument St, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272. (310) 907-9899
Date: October 2 & December 5 & 23, 2018 and August 10, 2018
Cuisine: Japanese / Sushi
Rating: Solid sushi, if a touch “typical” and American mainstream
Blue Ribbon Sushi is the only “exotic” place (and not really that exotic) in the new Palisades Village Complex.
The space is small but very cute with a big patio facing on the green.
The menu looks pretty decent.
Shishito peppers with miso sauce and bonito flakes (12/5/18). Not bad. A bit sweet and spicy.
House salad (8/10/19) was pretty good.
Miso Eggplant (8/10/19) was very (temperature hot), slightly sweet and salty and not bad.
Tiger Shrimp. Wasabi Mayo. Good, but a touch over fried and quite salty.
Hamachi Uzuukuri. Thin sliced hamachi. Ponzu sauce, Jalapeno, Togarashi, micro cilantro. Classic. Sauce was a bit too soy sauce.
Kanpachi (I think) with yuzu kosho (12/5/18). Better than the soy sauce above.
Scallop sashimi (12/5/18). Scallops were good but I didn’t like the pairing of the chili paste. Would have preferred yuzu and salt.
And low and behold, ordering it a year later (8/10/19) it had yuzu koshu and salt. Better, still very salty, and would be better with just fresh yuzu and sea salt.
Live Santa Barbara Spot Prawn Sashimi (8/10/19). Tender and tasty.
The heads came back deep fried. Ate everything but the eyeballs!
Lobster Sashimi (8/10/19). Slices in the back might be a fish, not sure. The back right is the lobster itself — excellent. Then in the front they turned the claws into lobster nigiri (nice) and those interesting shredded cooked lobster rolls.
Black Snapper Carpaccio. Black snapper sashimi, yuzu, kosher truffle oil, salt. Tasted too much like truffle oil. Sauce was very similar to the first one, masked the fish. So wasn’t really a success.
Salmon Carpaccio. Sliced salmon, Tomato Asian Mix, Ponzu sauce, truffle oil, olive oil and sea salt. Despite the slightly different sounding difference the sauce basically tasted the same. Didn’t really really properly tailored for the fish.
Mango Salmon Sashimi (8/10/19). Not ground breaking, but fine.
Toro Tartare. Tuna Belly, caviar & quail egg. The best dish of the night, probably. Solid enough for what it was.
Sushi. Salmon. Tuna. O-toro. Fine, but boring. The toro was sold as O-toro but tasted like chu-toro to me.
A sashimi plate (12/5/18) ordered at lunch. Not bad, but small and a touch “boring.”
A similar sushi plate (8/10/19).
On my third visit, at dinner with my son, I ordered some nigiri. Various white fish nigiri here (12/23/18). These weren’t bad, although leaning heavily on the yuzu kosho. I again didn’t like the scallop with the chili, although the scallop quality itself was quite good.
Lobster egg battleship and Dungeness crab battleship (12/23/18). Good quantity of shellfish.
Fresh water eel, uni, and ikura (12/23/18). All pretty good. Nigiri was moderately expensive, but pretty good.
I wasn’t super impressed with Blue Ribbon Sushi. Service was slightly green — but that’s fine as they are very new. The menu is okay, but execution is a little boring, heavy handed, or “white.” It’s like Nobu but a bit cheaper and considerably less interesting — and I’m not even that big a fan of the Nobu style of sushi. I like a more refined Japanese sensibility. I’ll go back to Blue Ribbon to see how it is on repeated visits, but I’m skeptical as if I would go repeatedly with so much other great sushi in LA.
My second visit (12/5/18) for lunch was better, as 3/4 sashimi dishes I ordered were solid, if not super exciting.
My fourth visit (8/10/19) was much better. Maybe I ordered better, maybe they have come into their own a bit, and I spent at least $150 just on myself as I ordered entirely sashimi — but it felt a bit more interesting and the fish was certainly good. They still lean a bit heavily on salt and the ultra salty yuzu koshu, but I’m upgrading my opinion to “good, if not super unique.”