One of my favorites

Uni

Located in the bottom of Clio Restaurant in the Eliot Hotel Boston

Menu: The best sashimi bar you will ever visit, with a French influence

Atmosphere: Sophisticated but slightly more casual than Clio

Kid Friendly: If your kids are into sashimi and fine dining.

Prices: Uni is not inexpensive, you may want to save a visit for special occasion, but it is worth every penny.

Reservations: Yes they take them, and it yes you should make one to be safe.

If someone were to ask me my favorite restaurant, I don't think I could pick one. There are a lot of places I have been with outstanding food. Now if you ask where can I get a good steak, or sushi, or local fare, I might be able to narrow it down. I could probably even give you a list of several favorite's.

One thing I do know, is any restaurant that Ken Oringer has opened would fall into my favorite's list. Ken doesn't need my praise to help him out. He is an internationally known chef, and he's won many awards and recognition over the years for his outstanding cuisine. If you haven't heard of Ken please don't think celebrity chef. True, he has battled in kitchen stadium and won against Cat Cora, but he is no celebrity chef like Todd English. I have been to Olive's and it is a T.G.I.Friday's compared to any of Ken's restaurants.

Lou and I decided to beat the crowds this Valentine's Day by going out on Friday and heading to one of our favorite Ken Oringer restaurants, Uni. Uni is in the Elliot hotel. It is a Sashimi bar connected to Clio. Clio is the first restaurant Ken opened in Boston. It was named best Newcomer by Gourmet magazine the first year it opened and name one of America's best new restaurants for the first 4 years it was open by Esquire magazine. This would be a very long blog entry if I list all of Ken's accolades, so if you want to read more about him, you can go to www.cliorestaurant.com.

After that introduction you might not expect my next comment, but 0ur night at Uni started off a bit slow. We sat for almost 20 minutes after we were first greeted and eventually had to ask someone to take our order. I know, I know. I just went on and on about this place. Honestly the service was out of character. It was a busy night, and I could see the girl who greeted us running up and down the stairs from Clio to Uni, so it seemed she was waiting on tables in both areas and taking our order slipped her mind.

Once our order was taken, the service was great, and although I don't usually use such fancy words, the food can only be defined as exquisite. For all the years I spent working in the restaurant industry, I should probably be ashamed at how little technically I know about great food. Eating at Uni reminds me of this. Ken takes unique ingredients and turns them into extraordinary cuisine.

After that long wait, I ordered a Lichee Martini. It was made up of a lichee puree, stawberry vodka, a few floating strawberries and a sugared rim.

For our dinner we started off with Anago Tempura (Salt Water Eel) with green tea salt and a shirred egg. This is where my lack of food knowledge kicks in. I have no idea what a shirred egg is or how you shir an egg. The definition I found online says it is an egg cooked in an individual ramekin with cream and cheddar. This definition doesn't do justice to what came to our table(neither does my picture unfortunately). Our shirred egg was in an egg shell which was perfectly sliced off at the top. The egg and cheese were a creamy concoction which hardly induced thoughts of an egg. It was euphoria and the perfect topping for our Anago Tempura.

Our next course was the Spicy Tuna Tataki with foie gras, cumin cilantro, aji amarillo and pear. First of all this dish is beautiful. I hardly wanted to eat it. This is the type of dish that I go to a Ken Oringer restaurant to eat. I know I like spicy tuna, and foie gras and cilantro, but I don't know when put together with an aji amarillo and pear, they will be an incredible combination of flavor.

Our next dish we ordered was Bronzini which should have been sea bass, but the restaurant had substituted Fluke. It was served with jalapeno vinaigrette, blood orange and thai basil, and was another beautiful, delicious course.

We finished our dinner with the Steak Teriyaki of Kobe Beef, with Kabayaki glaze, Vidalia onion juice, seasoned salts and lime. This course sounds pretty mundane, but in taste it was one of the most amazing of the night. Kobe beef is an outstanding cut on it's own, but paired with the different salts and the Teriyaki glaze to dip it in, it was from another dimension. One of the salts was smoked. Dipping just a little bit onto the beef gave the flavor an unexpected hearty, smokey boost which can only be described as other worldly.

After this amazing dinner, we couldn't leave without dessert! We got the warm ginger bread biscuit with creme freche, and the white chocolate pudding with coffee cake crumbles. My descriptions on the desserts are lacking. As you can see they both had icecream/sorbet but I took the pictures below so enjoy with your eyes. The ginger bread biscuit takes 20 minutes to cook, but it has a molten center which oozes out into the creme freche and sorbet and it is worth every second it takes to cook.

Ken's other restaurants include Verdad, a unique taco experience by Fenway with handmade tortillas! Toro, a tapas restaurant in the South End, KO Prime a steakhouse off of Tremont, Copa, the newest of his places, (I haven't been there yet), and my absolute favorite Clio. When I ate at Clio I sat across from my mother and every bite we took we said, "This is the best food I have ever had in my life."