An Iron Chef Experience
Yes, I watch too many episodes of Iron Chef and yes, my husband has a celebrity crush on Morimoto. When we found ourselves with a few hours to spare in downtown Philadelphia, we made a beeline to Morimoto's self-named restaurant in order to feast on sushi and cooked seafood dishes.
Arriving right as the restaurant opened for lunch, we found ourselves the only customers. The restaurant has a funky, modern design -- it looks cool at first but gets old quickly. There's an unmovable lightpiece in the middle of your table that always seems to be in the way, making sharing plates difficult and annoying. Additionally, once the restaurant started filling up with other guests, it got noisy. If it's loud in the middle of the day, it must be ridiculous on a Saturday night.
Our server greeted us within moments of being seated and from there on out, the service was extraordinary. Already, Morimoto was worlds above our strip mall sushi joint. Our server informed us of the lunch omakase option and suggested a few other menu items to be aware of. This wasn't just an average lunch date for us, so we were excited to try Morimoto's specialties.
I knew I wanted to try a few specific dishes, so ordered a sushi starter followed by one of the lunch sets: ishi yaki bop (a rice dish prepared tableside in a hot stone bowl) with soup and salad. My husband ordered the omakase, or tasting menu.
As we ate through our numerous courses, our reactions varied from "it's good" to "wow, I've never eaten anything better!". Nothing was a bad dish, but some things weren't particularly special and therefore very overpriced. I'd pass on what I ordered (the miso soup, house salad, and ishi yaki bop) and instead recommend any of the sushi, the tartare, seared scallop, and black cod miso.
So the real question is…was Morimoto worth it? After detouring into Center City, tasting roughly a third of the menu, and parting with $210, my opinion is NO, it wasn't worth all that. My meal was very good and the service was great, but it wasn't $200 good. For the record, my husband disagrees with me and certainly wouldn't mind trying one of Morimoto’s other restaurants.
