Out to eat: Beluga

Baja roll from Beluga (Credit: Ernest Coleman | Metromix)

It seems a little silly to make a reservation for 9 p.m. Wednesday at a Cincinnati restaurant. But when we walked into Beluga on a recent evening during half-price sushi night, we were glad we'd called ahead.

The mood: The place was packed, a diverse crowd of young and old, every one of them dressed better than we were. One of the attractive hosts (there must be a factory somewhere that churns them out) seated us immediately, and we had a chance to sit in the candlelight and soak up Beluga's clean, modern décor.

After a few minutes of sitting across from me, my friend joined me on the banquette, because Beluga is loud. You'll have to compete with the volume of your neighbors, or you can do what I tried to do - eavesdrop on their every word. Shame the guy beside me had nothing interesting to say.

The food: We'd come during "I Love Sushi Wednesdays" for a specific reason - from 5 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. the sushi is half-price. But before that, we started with a lady purse ($8) appetizer: super-crispy pork dumplings in a red pepper purée. We crunched our way through the starter and surveyed the sushi menu.

Not all sushi is discounted - you can't, for instance, get the sushi chef's special "Titanic" for half the usual $100 - but plenty of rolls and sashimi fall under the special. We settled on two pieces of grilled albacore and spicy tuna, crazy tuna, jade, rainbow and Texas rolls. Our server returned with a giant plate of gleaming fish. We couldn't wait to dig in.

OK, I'll allow that I might be the one with the problem here, but I do think it's possible for a roll to pack too much into a bite-sized piece. Take the Texas roll: tuna, salmon, white fish, yellowtail, spicy crab, cucumber and asparagus. Oh, and it was dusted with seaweed powder, which adds sort of a swampy kick to the mix. The jade roll was a bit more modest: tuna, salmon, crab meat, avocado and asparagus, all wrapped in soy bean paper. Still, it took a lot of chewing.

In the end, we ate the entire plate and enjoyed most of it. (We couldn't beat the price, either - just $35 for the fish after the bill was sliced in half.) Still, our favorite was the simple, elegant spicy tuna roll. Next time, I'm going to skip the "creative rolls" - don't get me started on the cowboy roll, with steak and goat cheese - and go back to the basics, which Beluga does better than just about anyone in town.

And finally: Just wanted to mention that a 20 percent tip is included during half-price sushi night to keep you stingy tippers from stiffing the help. We knew this ahead of time, but were beyond pleased when our server not only told us this, but circled it on the check. Sunnie, you did well.

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