It is Japanese cuisine month in Blagoevgrad

Photo by Alexander Pirlya

A small Japanese-cuisine menu is being offered at Frame Bar and Food in downtown Blagoevgrad and includes, in addition to sushi, several cooked teriyaki and yakitori entrees. These main dishes of chicken or pork continue the drift away from authentic Japanese cuisine, but nonetheless create a contrast to the city's tedious, chicken-or-pork-and-potatoes mainstream fare.

The princess of Frame's Japanese menu is the sushi - large bites of raw pink salmon or shrimp laid on logs of sticky rice or cross sections of rice, ersatz crab, avocado and a dab of orange roe rolled in green-black seaweed wrappers. Frame's sushi selection is limited - you won't find tuna or sea urchin sushi, for example - and pieces are too large for comfortable popping into the mouth whole as the Japanese do, but the sushi tastes as if it was rolled in the kitchen a moment ago from recently caught fish.

Except for that fake crab - what did the deity intend that material to be before man decided it was crab? In Frame's sushi, it tastes mostly like bulking agent, although its white-and-coral color is pretty in the sushi cross sections.

The servings of sushi at Frame are generous, though expensive. A combination plate cost 13.90 leva for 10 pieces, for example.

Sushi is traditionally accompanied by large slices of fresh ginger root and a 50-stotinki-sized dollop of green wasabi (similar to horseradish) paste for those who wish to electrify the experience of their Japanese cuisine. However at Frame, the ginger is a dried-up disappointment and the tiny bits of wasabi look like large mouse droppings on the plate. But wait, the soy sauce used for dipping the sushi is plentiful and wonderfully salty - just the zing the sushi needs.

The pork teriyaki and chicken yakitori entrees sampled were hardly worth the calories. A bottle of sweet and sour teriyaki sauce may have been waved over the pork fillets before they were cooked to dust, but that seemed to be the extent of the seasoning. The chicken on skewers fared better: Bulgarian kitchens being familiar with cooking on sticks or swords. The yakitori presentation was also pretty - chicken alternating with wide sections of scallion tops. Still, the flavor was just chicken and onion, onion and chicken, with no subtlety.

Frame's chef made an attempt at Japanese-style salads, although all were not successful. There was lots of chicken in the chicken salad and plenty of rice noodles in the rice noodle with egg and cucumber concoction. A salad that promised edamame or soybeans, contained bean sprouts - taste, texture and color 180-degrees away from the Japanese standard, and the green shapes promised in the menu picture. The sprouts were served on a bed of potato salad with three long strips of bacon laid alongside the mound. If a Japanese person were to be confronted with the mixture they would have been intrigued but mystified.

Worth particular note in the successful, it-has-taste category, is a garnish that decorated the entrée plates - a tangle of shredded, spicy daikon, a large white radish, mixed with slivers of green onion. A bite of the salad-like garnish pricked the palate with a clean, bright flavor.

Sushi month at Frame is much like March itself - changeable and full of whims. Still, the sushi is worth trying and enjoying. Frame gets cheers for its audacity and the imagination it is showing. May we suggest Tex-Mex next month?

JMC professors Sandra Earley and Phelps Hawkins lived and ate in Tokyo for three years.