alt.eats.columbus

Cuisine: Japanese
1155 Old Henderson Rd.
(614) 451-4010

As a born-and-raised-in-the-midwest American who has designed restaurant interior spaces, I always find something vaguely disorienting about Japanese restaurant environments. Everything is extremely orderly and astonishingly similar to what you’d expect from a Western environment, except for when it isn’t, and those minute exceptions accumulate until the mind starts to melt from uncanny valley overload. The new Tensuke Express is like that, times 100, and I love it to the point that I’d go there just to sit in the space and puzzle over it even if the food was awful, which it isn’t.

Every second restaurant that opens in Columbus has this artful hodgepodge thing going on – mismatched chairs, scads of different light fixtures, fabric and material changes all over the place. Tensuke Express does too, but it doesn’t look like any of the rest of them. At all. While the norm is dark, brooding, reclaimed industrial, Tensuke Express is bright and shiny and new, with yellows and whites dominating. Sure, there are hanging window frames and rope decor elements, but also abaci, framed out room structures with names like ‘curry corner’, and dedicated bins for returning your chopsticks, soup spoons, and just about anything else you might accumulate during the course of your meal. It’s the rarest of things – a restaurant that doesn’t look, or even entirely function, like any other restaurant, but isn’t worse off for it.

We weren’t the first customer in the space, but we were close enough to it to witness the celebratory picture-taking of the actual first. Restaurants are usually freaking the f*ck out upon open, but there was none of that – everyone we came in contact with (and they were emphatically not understaffed) was absolutely beaming with pride. The Japanese are well known for their reserve, but not even the strictures of culture could contain their unalloyed joy. As such, it was unexpectedly affecting.

So, lets get around to talking about food. Tensuke Express seems set up to primarily be a quick service noodle bar – ramen, soba, or udon. Pick a noodle, pick a broth, pick toppings, pay, get a buzzer that tells you when to pick up your order at the counter. There are some rice bowl and curry options, as well as a few sides, but those are relegated to a paper menu. It’s about the noodle bowls, people!, or so you’d gather from their prominence on the oversized menu boards.

We got ramen – one tonkotsu with chashu, one miso with spicy pork kimchi. They were served hot, enough so that it actually made sense to slurp as the Japanese do, and to understand why they do it. The noodles were perfect, period. I’ll hazard to guess that they are actually making their own broths in-house, and the effort shows – they might not have been the best I’ve ever had, but they’re good, and better than you’d have any reason to expect on a restaurant’s first day open.

Which is a good enough reason not to delve any deeper into food at this point – they opened strong, but there’s plenty of reason to expect they’ll get even better. We’ve been semi-regulars of the old Tensuke Express, and the only thing that might compromise that is the new sushi bar Tensuke’s owners are putting into the old Tensuke Express space. It should be open in a few weeks, and we’re eager to see it and tell you about it. Stay tuned.

My (admittedly somewhat jaded) feelings about dessert are that most sweets are not too terribly different from most others, and when they are you often wish they weren’t. Consequently, it’s unusual for us to get overly excited about a dessert place.

This makes Dessert Bowl very unusual.

Dessert Bowl’s sizable Asian-style dessert menu is a distinct departure from the Western same-same, and amounts to a lesson on turning ingredients you’d never imagine finding in a dessert into finished dishes that charm with their novelty as they seduce with intriguingly harmonious flavor and alluring presentation.

Our first taste of Dessert Bowl’s cleverness came from menu item D10 – ‘Mango sago cream with pomelo in Mango base’. To demystify a bit, sago is nothing more than tapioca, and pomelo is a mild Southeast Asian fruit that is often described as a less bitter cousin to grapefruit. Mango is pureed with milk and coconut cream to create the base, and the fruit and tapioca combine with it to create a rich and tangy blend of tropical flavors and wildly varying textures. Spoons collided above this bowl more than once.

Next we tried the ‘crispy glutinous rice balls’ (A4). It’s an inelegant name, in translation at least, that belies a spectacular experience. Filled with a sweet bean paste, chewy balls of glutinous rice dough are rolled in rice flour and fried. Then, six to an order, they’re placed atop a bed of crushed peanuts and drizzled with a syrup. If you’ve ever had Japanese mochi, you’ll immediately understand this dish and almost certainly prefer it. If you haven’t, skip the mochi and start right here – it’s that good.

Crepes feature prominently, both in Asian dessert in general and on this menu in particular, so we tried the mango & banana version (K3). Filled with fresh fruit aplenty and drizzled with chocolate and another unidentified but tasty syrup, the only sense in which it didn’t satisfy was in the novelty department.

For that, we turned to the ‘black glutinous rice congee with coconut’ (T9). Rice congees traditionally tend to be a savory breakfast porridge, so sweet piqued the curiosity. Our gamble netted us a warm bowl of nutty black rice combined with a sweet coconut base that featured a subtle salty counterpoint. Improbable though it may have sounded, it disappeared quickly.

As did everything else. Our trio of grazers ordered all of the above after having already eaten a full and substantial meal. Portions were larger than we might’ve expected, and we approached the place expecting to taste but not finish. And yet, quickly, everything was gone.

Credit is due to the chef, a pleasant and congenial Malaysian gentleman who worked a stint at an Asian restaurant in a Vegas casino. He pointed to this experience as formative, and we can only imagine that it must have been. We like where it’s taken him. Simply put, on any short list of local destination dessert stops that include Pistacia Vera and Jeni’s, we believe that Dessert Bowl should feature prominently.

Last thought – if you’re looking for Zimmern-level culinary adventurism, Dessert Bowl can provide. The potently aromatic durian fruit is available in several dishes, and the spendy delicacy known as birds nest soup is the base for several others.