Our minds have been dragged through mud -- a deep, thick, viscous mud. After depriving ourselves of a decent Friday night and the prolonged slumber that would typically follow, dragging ourselves to the testing center sans breakfast, producing six forms of positive identification plus a blood sample, we were -- for the low, low price of $112 -- entitled to have said grey matter drawn through a sequence of progressively finer woven wire screens known only as the Graduate Record Examination. Suffice it to say that at present our minds would be best likened to an espresso grind.
Bored with the plebeian nature of the prose of the reading comprehension passages, we resolved to write this week's column during the course of the exam, through an elaborate nonverbal discourse of strategically queued coughs, dropped pencils, frantic erasures, restroom breaks, and silence-shattering primal screams.
Alas, the minions of this educational parasite forbade us from removing the written transcript from the testing room, and swiped our 2B pencils, to boot. Fortunately for us, they did not drive said 2B pencils into our unsuspecting ankles as punishment.
Despite these potentially grave cranial setbacks, we still retain enough of the subtle flavor of this week's critical dining endeavor to produce an accurate, albeit possibly deranged, writeup. In fact, one of us picked a little out of his teeth during the math section. Those little orange fish eggs really have a way of evading the floss....
As you might have guessed, this week we ventured once more into a house of uncooked fish. Kishi, one of the nearest sushi showrooms, serves up authentic albeit pricey Japanese cuisine with all the atmospheric vitality of so many fledgling lounge acts.
We set off with consuming appetites and well-nourished billfolds, but returned with full stomachs and voracious wallets. Nonetheless, this comes as a refreshing tradeoff when compared to the impoverishing brain-grating available in the GRE.
What does all the extra money get you, one may ask? Well, it sure as hell isn't quality chopsticks -- the little-more-than balsa twigs we were presented with failed to split anywhere near the ill-perforated medians of their posterior ends, leaving us to the task of eating with grossly imbalanced utensils, somehow reminiscent of trying to ski down a mountainside using an alpine pole and a lamp post.
On the other hand, if you happen to experience a birthday while dining at Kishi, you will be treated to a full power outage replete with an impassioned chorus and flash photography. What's more, even if you're not the one with the birthday, you still get the thrill of vicarious experience by being pitched into temporary blackness along with the rest of the restaurant during the succinct outburst. We enjoyed two of these unexpected mid-bite blackouts during our meal, during one of which Ryan, missing his mouth, nearly lost an eye.
"Say, Ryan, even though you've taken Japanese for three years and lived in Tokyo for months on end, can we still say that my numerous childhood screenings of `Shogun' afford me the upper hand in Japanese?"
"Uh, say, Andy, I don't think you're supposed to eat that inari in one bite..."
"Mrrph mrufruf?" (Loosely translated: "No kidding?")
We were a bit put off by the well-meaning yet perhaps tacitly condescending cultural delicacy with which the maitre d' presented our miso-shiro to us as "soy bean soup." We forgive her on the basis that a foreign cuisine restaurant which resides so close to the infamous Vince's Spaghetti probably has no choice but to take such precautions. At least the sushi wasn't toted as "raw fish slices on sweetened vinaigrette rice clumps."
Given the number of Japanese restaurants we have reviewed over the history of this column, one might think we could muster a reasonably professional evaluation of Kishi. This not being the case, we'll just have to say that Kishi has decent food, but at a price that is not warranted by their cheap chopsticks and inelegant atmosphere -- much like that of a GRE testing site.
Unless you want to drive much farther, you might try them at 320
W. Foothill Blvd., Upland. You'll be surprised to learn that they are
quietly nestled in an unbecoming strip mall. The phone company
knows them only by (909) 981-1770.
Mawkish minions of satan beware.