For a few years now, Dallas’ new Japanese restaurants have focused on high-end presentations of the cuisine: tasting menus of cured fish or yakitori with extraordinary attention to detail and three-figure price tags. But in parallel we’ve had a wave of more approachable newcomers that serve everything from curry katsu to tomato ramen.
Even in the sushi market, the spread of handrolls across Dallas has brought a new casualness to the scene. Otaru Sushi and Handroll Bar, which opened in early August, marks Oak Cliff’s first handroll bar. You won’t sit down here for a several-hour tasting or debate over a multitude of fish flown in direct from Japan that morning. Instead, meals here tend to be surprisingly speedy and efficient. The menu is concise and the dining room is spare.
Otaru’s space previously housed Lucia for a decade, and as such is probably one of the most romanticized dining addresses in Dallas. The new restaurant has transformed it with a gentle hand. The tiny former Lucia kitchen is now a bar, prep, and storage area. The sushi bar takes up almost the entire dining room, and only a handful of tables sit apart from it. Unless you’re a party of four, you should take a bar stool and sit in front of the chefs. (As at Otaru’s sibling restaurant, Kome on Walnut Hill Lane, you’ll probably still order from a server.)
Part of the reason that a meal here can go so quickly is that many of the ingredients are already prepared. Peer over the counter and you’ll see the handroll fillings waiting to be folded into sheets of nori: a rather creamy snow crab salad, bite-sized trimmings of salmon, spicy tuna mix, shaved raw scallops. The seaweed sheets themselves are kept warm, pickled ginger is waiting to be added to your serving board, and garnishes are all lined up.
Our seaweed salad appetizer had been pre-mixed, and needed just a (very large) squirt of sesame oil for service. Next, we ordered nigiri specials off the board: shima aji served raw, dabbed with flakes of sea salt that had turned black from steeping in soy sauce, and kinmedai (red snapper) that met a blowtorch for just a few seconds, enough to add a gently smokey flavor but not enough to actually cook.
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North Oak Cliff
Of the three handrolls in the basic set menu—three for $15.90—my favorite was the salmon, prepared with well-marbled, fatty fish. The bay scallop roll centers on fresh, flavorful scallops sliced and layered for easy bites. Crab, by contrast, is chopped finely, even shredded, and comes across in flavor but offers no texture. All three handrolls were very generously filled, flirting with excess. Maybe it sounds wild to complain of a too-big portion, but ingredients can easily fall out of handrolls, and there is such a thing as too much seafood in one bite.
A couple weeks after my first visit, I accidentally stumbled into an Otaru pop-up down the street, to which the bar delivered its handrolls sliced up and placed in boxes, effectively turning them into regular makizushi (a sushi roll with seaweed on the outside). I liked them better that way. Handrolls must be eaten quickly before the seaweed’s texture changes; a tray of regular sushi imposes no such deadline.
Taken on its own, Otaru is good for the neighborhood, but not a drive-across-town destination. As far as I know, it’s one of just two sushi restaurants in Dallas located south of the Trinity River. (The other, Zen Sushi, is less than two blocks away.) Oak Cliff may not be a hub of the Dallas area’s Asian population, but it has thousands of residents who eat sushi. Otaru saves them the trip up north and its handroll combo menus offer affordable quick options to Bishop Arts. The three handrolls for $15.90 deal is filling enough for a meal by itself; when I added sushi pieces, salad, and tip, my lunch climbed to $45 per person.
Otaru also fits into Dallas’ continuing evolution as the city with the best Japanese food scene between America’s coasts. I’ve been banging on this drum for a while, trying to make sure that Dallas knows just what we have in our Japanese cuisine. Our strength is most obvious at the high end, of course: landmark restaurants like Tei-An transformed the scene in Texas and paved the way for tasting menus at spots like Tatsu and Mābo. Sushi bars like Namo and Kaiyo source fish better than any landlocked American city has a right to expect.
In that bigger picture, my favorite handroll bar in Dallas is still Nori in Deep Ellum. But a quality handroll bar in Oak Cliff—a sushi battle in Bishop Arts, even!—represents another step in Dallas’ growth as a city where Japanese food is a critical thread in the culinary fabric. A taco truck on every corner and a seaweed salad in every ZIP code: that’s us.
Otaru Sushi and Handroll Bar, 408 W. Eighth St., Ste. 101
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