Vanessa Druckman

"My Most Exciting Food Experience"

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Two years ago, if you'd told me that I would be making the claim that I'd had my most exciting food experience in Columbus, Ohio, I would have laughed in your face. But yet here I am, telling you exactly that preposterous statement. And it wasn't even in a hip restaurant with pulsing lights and shiny young things in skintight jeans somewhere in downtown Columbus. This incredible meal took place in a strip mall in an outlying suburb, at a little Japanese restaurant called Kihachi, nestled next to a Blockbuster store.

I had read great things about Kihachi from local food bloggers, but I still wasn't expecting much. Yet when I crossed the threshold, I felt as if I had stepped in another land, one far away from the scarlet-shirted sport fans that mill around Columbus. The place was tiny, just six tabletops surrounded by a handful of private tatami houses. Every head swiveled in our direction to inspect my husband and I, and evaluate the newcomers. Most of the diners were Japanese, and they simply nodded respectfully before turning back to their food. There was a ceremonial hush, a chorus of whispered appreciation that comes with really great food. My heart began racing as I realized that we were about to have a very special experience.

Our hostess greeted us with a smile and a little bow and she showed us to our tatami house. We took off our shoes, climbed in to our secluded little den, and waited for the feast to begin.

Calling it a feast is not doing the meal justice. For the next few hours, we had a once in a lifetime experience, a culinary voyage to the depths of Japan. We ate a total of nine courses over the next three hours, many had tastes that we had never encountered before. When we left New York, our last meal was at Nobu57, one of our favorite restaurants. This meal at Kihachi made me realize that Nobu has made a lot of concessions to the Western palate. Here at Kihachi, I truly felt as if I were eating in Japan. What an adventure!

Before I begin describing the meal, let me apologize for my neophyte descriptions of the ingredients. While I love visiting Japanese supermarkets, I am just an enthusiastic amateur.

We started with a trio of colorful small plates with distinctive textures. The octopus had been lightly boiled with pickled plum. A beautiful purple herb lay on top of sushi rice mounds on the second plate. And a bracingly briny geoduck clam topped with a creamy miso vinaigrette was sliced in a third bowl.

The next course was more of a composition piece, an assorted plate with foods of vastly different shapes, colors, tastes and textures. The two main characters were a dark baby octopus that had been marinated in miso and a flash fried baby pink whole sweet shrimp. Root vegetables and sea weed surrounded them, providing a variety of sweet and salty tastes that made our palates alive with the changes. I have to admit that I approached both the octopus and the shrimp with some trepidation, but both were excellent, although in very different ways. The octopus was rich and savory from the right amount of soy and miso, and the shrimp, which we ate whole, was sweet and lightly crunchy.

After that came the most elaborate tempura I've ever had: shrimp pate wrapped in lotus root. Soup was the following course - an intoxicating mix of eel and spongy mushroom.

Sashimi came next: unbelievably fresh fish. There was sea bream, velvety fatty tuna, Japanese Jack fish, and mackerel sandwiched between lime slices.

The fresh seafood was followed by sweet caramelized pig cheeks and a soft shell crab served in a broth with tofu.

We were about to explode, struggling to finish the crab (probably the least interesting dish we had all night), when our waitress poked her head in to announce, "dinner is coming soon." We turned to each other, certain that we had misunderstood and that dessert was soon to come, but instead she brought in a beautiful platter of sushi including a toro scallion roll.

When she next knocked on our paper door, I was scared. I just didn't think I could eat another bite. Mercifully, she was carrying dessert. A small plate of thinly sliced poached pears with one lone dark blackberry. What an ideal way to end this incredible feast!

As we waited for the check, we replayed the meal, amazed by all we had experienced. Little by little, we both grew nervous, wondering this meal would go down in the books as not only our most exotic anniversary dinner, but also our most expensive.

Once the check arrived, we were relieved to see that the Omakase dinner was $85 per person - an incredible value for a feast of a lifetime. If we had been in New York city, I would have been washing dishes for a long time to be able to afford such a meal. When we stumbled back out into the deserted strip mall parking lot, I did a double-take, jarred by the sudden reintroduction to the anonymity of suburban sprawl after such an incredible dinner in the heart of Japan.