Best Culture Clash

Metro features a sushi bar, furnished
with a house sushi chef who prepares food in view of customers, which,
for its pseudo-classiness, is a bit out of the ordinary for the area.
The dozens of sushi dishes listed on Metro’s menu are coupled with
further dozens of martini suggestions, the likes of which seem a bit
pricey—$8 a pop—for college kids. 

Upon a recent Thursday night visit, this
writer, who is a poor judge of seafood due to his broadcast distaste
for it, brought along a capable taste tester to sample the cuisine. To
our bemusement, we found ourselves in a quixotic mix of  20-something couples, as well as an out-of-place beer imbiber garbed in a Dallas Cowboys sweat shirt.

Nudging toward the safer side of the
restaurant’s offerings, I sampled the cucumber rolls, a fair snack at
$4. However, a pairing with the haiku martini, a sake mixture and three
baby onions on a skewer (like the three lines of a haiku, get it?), was
perhaps a bad choice for the light dish, given the drink’s beefy, musky
taste.

My taste-testing partner boldly went
where she had never gone before (even as a seafood eater, she was a raw
fish newbie), ordering the amaebe sushi at $6, a sweet shrimp
dish served with the heads of two menacing, fried crustaceans peering
up at their eater. Her first bold bite of the over-the-top meal freaked
her out a bit, not because of the preparation but because of the new
sensation of trying sushi for the first time. Her only viable report
afterward was that the pear-flavored martini she coupled with her meal
was a sweet, pleasant alternative. 

Therefore, given our lack of sushi
expertise and scattershot choices, we were poor judges of Metro’s food,
and neither of us can say definitively whether or not Metro’s sushi in
particular is a fine reproduction of the Japanese tradition. Our
apologies to the sushi chef on duty, who we hope wasn’t put off by
sending back an unfinished meal. For two drinks and two meals, our bill
clocked out at $26, an acceptable price for a casual date.

We did get a kick out of Metro’s
culture-clash decor, a flamboyant mishmash of wavy-gravy flourishes and
neon-purple lighting fixtures that couldn’t be further from Japanese:
Perhaps, in fact, they were made in China. A variety of eccentric
paintings dizzied our senses amid the restaurant’s mixture of visual
styles, a fact even further complicated by sporting events flashing on
plasma televisions. Likely, that inclusion is an attempt at retaining
the bar’s previous sports-fan patrons regardless of its new, hip dining
motif.

Throw in a pool table and a dance
floor/stage that hosts live bands each week, and Metro is just a
bowling alley, multiplex and 24-hour barbershop shy of being a truly
all-inclusive hot spot. But regardless of the lack of focus, its odd
location in an area that may better be served by a more casual
atmosphere and its desire to completely overwhelm your eyes with decor
manufactured at the shnozzberry factory, there are some upsides. If
you’re looking for an exotic experience in a town that has so many bars
cast from the same mold, or you’re in the mood to take that first foray
into the challenging world of sushi, Metro is worth a shot.