Sake Club
2635 Connecticut Ave., N.W.
(202) 322-2711
$20-$30 per person
Grade: B-
There are two kinds of restaurants for the average student: those with wallet-friendly prices and substantial portions, and those reserved for birthdays, good dates and when parents come to town - where the prices are usually higher, the food fancier and the chances you can get mozzarella sticks at 2 a.m. much lower. Woodley Park's Sake Club definitely falls into the latter category.
The interior of Sake Club is dark and dreamy, lit to illuminate only the fine diner's prettier features. It's rich and exotic, not unlike pretty much every other upscale Japanese restaurant in the city, loaded with plush chairs and tiny tables conducive to intimacy. There are several dining rooms, including a somewhat V.I.P.-esque set-up toward the back. With satin-covered cushioned booths lining the room, the tables can be pushed around to accommodate just about whatever a group needs. The whole affair can seem somewhat ostentatious, which is surprisingly appropriate when celebrating.
And to many, celebrating seldom happens without some form of booze or another. Sake Club's sake and wine list is impressive to say the least, with appealing descriptions and offering of sampler platters for nearly each category of sake. Bottles range from less than $20 to well over $200, so there's something to satisfy anyone's budget. Unfortunately, the large menu makes no effort to discern between the various types of sake offered, a disappointing struggle for anyone trying to rectify their decision to spend $60 on a bottle of wine. High-ranking tastes on Sake Club's namesake menu include the flavored sake sampler, with raspberry and Asian pear sake selections, as well as the light and sweet plum wine.
An evening at Sake Club is usually quite enjoyable, up until the moment when the food arrives. Its menu, featuring almost entirely Japanese cuisine with an adventurous take on sushi, is diverse and mouthwatering, but the food itself is disappointing. The seaweed salad tastes like the grass had just been plucked from its ocean yard, but in a bad way. The greens were overly salty and lacking the appealing sesame flavor and texture of other seaweed salads.
The sushi is not particularly exciting, despite the laundry list of interesting ingredients included. The presence of salmon roe can be overwhelming, while the crab and fish used in even the most basic California roll can lack taste completely. While most collegiate diners are used to dropping between $3 and $5 for sushi, just one piece of nigiri could be well above that at Sake Club.
Where the appetizers and sushi fall short, the entrees pick up the slack. The seared tuna and broiled eel are both fantastic, using fresh cuts of fish over soft beds of rice. The eel flavor is spot-on and complimented by slices of fresh avocado and saut?ed asparagus. The portion appears meager at first, but the food is so worth savoring that it quickly becomes quite filling and worth the $18. This is fortunate for Sake Club, as delicious entrees like this are immediately redeeming for most of their shortcomings.
There is one thing that makes Sake Club overlap between those two categories of restaurants: The place will deliver to your doorstep through a number of delivery services, such as Foodler.com and Takeout Taxi. So next time you and your parents are planning a night at home but you still want to take advantage of their price range, or perhaps you're fond of Japanese cuisine but don't want to deal with that pesky thing called ambiance, consider Sake Club.
