Sometimes, just sometimes, you try a dish that is not only delicious, but the clearest embodiment of what a chef, or a restaurant, is trying to achieve. And then sometimes, just sometimes, that same dish touches you on a deep, emotional level.
I experienced that at the newly opened Uchiko in Legacy West.
Yellow evening light fills the restaurant. It's early in the week, and Uchiko is packed. The restaurant's name loosely translates as "child of Uchi" — loosely, because it's grammatically incorrect Japanese. Which is fine.
Uchi, of course, is the self-proclaimed "non-traditional" Japanese restaurant from James Beard Award-winning chef Tyson Cole and his restaurant group Hai Hospitality. The Uchi brand has been spun off into other restaurants, Uchiba and Uchiko. ("Uchi" means "house.") Dallas has Uchi and Uchiba, but Plano now has Uchiko, which shares some of the menu items, but features unique items and wood-frilled grills absent in its Dallas counterparts. If you want sushi and wood-fired meat and fish, Uchiko in Plano beckons.
"We think this is a beautiful space, and we hope you like what we are doing here," Allie Davis, the general manager, says. Davis, a Plano native, opened the Uchiko in Houston. She also went to high school down the street — "But," she adds, "all of this didn't exist then." This, of course, is Legacy West.
At Uchiko, sushi is, as you'd expect, great, but Plano has exclusive offerings, including the bluefin kamatoro (fatty tuna collar), which isn't served at Uchi in Dallas. There are other Uchiko-only items, including the roasted oysters (koji-creamed spinach and ponzu) and hearth-roasted lobster (Tom Kha, king trumpet confit and umeboshi butter) as well as a dry-aged New York strip and a 45-day dry-aged cowboy ribeye with yuzu kosho butter, sunomono and Japanese sweet potato). But as delicious as that all is, for me, there is one dish that best encapsulates the Uchiko experience in the most delicious and the deepest way.
Branzino. These days, go into a nice restaurant, and you'll see it. Growing up in Dallas in the 1980s, I don't remember ever eating branzino or hearing my parents talk about it. Prime rib, filet mignon and lobster were the culinary currency of the day.
"This is our whole branzino," Chef de Cuisine Steffan Perico says, setting the plate on the table. "It's cooked on our wood-fired hearth and meant to be shared." Here, they use local post oak — the same wood that's smoked barbecue. The branzino is umami-rich goodness, served with brown butter dashi and accented with fennel. The flavors delight, and if Uchiko had stopped there, this would still be a fabulous fish. But they didn't. Thank god for that.
The post-oak smoke gives depth and adds character, underpinning the savoriness. This branzino is the culinary equivalent of a vinyl record, and everything up to now, while fantastic, has been CDs. Flavor at 45 revolutions per minute. But it's that same post-oak smoke that whenever it fills my nose, wherever I am, always stirs my soul and makes me feel Texas. If Uchiko had used Japanese white charcoal, those feelings would not be evoked.
Later, while waiting for our car, we spot chef Perico and Kaz Edwards, director of culinary operations of Uchi restaurants. I tell them they have one of the best branzinos in the county — heck, one of the best branzinos I've ever had, and thank them for dinner.
Uchiko isn't purely a Japanese restaurant. But its spirit is entirely Japanese: the country's culture and language borrows elements from abroad, reworks them and, then, makes them its own. Here, Uchiko takes cues from Japanese cuisine, and with this dish and a deftness of both umami and Texas smoke. The result is something very, very special.
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