When a patron enters the new sake-sushi grill Blue, in the Ironworks complex of off 86th street, they are greeted with Japanese-style decor, including a gigantic image of the original godzilla from 1953, as well as several Japanese soda advertisements.
The thematic decor ends there. Once a patron sits down and takes in Blue, one cannot help but realize that the music in Blue is the farthest from what is expected in a sushi restaurant.
While it is not a dealbreaker for the restaurant, the use of modern Pop music as background entertainment is not what is to be expected from a Japanese-themed sushi restaurant.
The missteps of Blue continue into the menu.
It is a common practice among some restaurants to add water to sodas so that the restaurant can save money by not having to purchase that much soda.
The watering down of the sodas at Blue is some of the worst that there is in Indianapolis. While Mountain Dew is not the greatest drink, with its high sugar content, but it is also a good indicator of the amount of watering down the restaurant does, with its bright green color.
The Mountain Dew was more water than it was soda. It was comical. The joke was that there were six glasses of water on the table, not four.
But, sodas are no indicator of what a restaurant is like. It is the food.
The sushi was pretty good. While the menu is very cluttered – there are, what I estimate, are at least 75 different items on three different menus – but that just means there are many options to choose from.
With large parties, instead of bringing the sushi out on individual plates, Blue brings all the sushi at once on a wooden boat with a waving cat that emits dry ice.
While I give the boat an “A” for presentation, the presentation does not improve the food.
Amongst the standard riffraff that one orders at a sushi restaurant in the US, there was some oddities.
One of these items were frozen shrimp heads. Yes, shrimp heads, that are frozen.
While the novelty is genuine, the flavor is not. The frozen shrimp heads, while not tasting bad, did not taste good, either. It did not really have a taste, at all.
Aside from the shrimp heads, the sushi, overall, was good quality sushi. The crunchy LA, the orange one, was a favorite as it had a pleasant sweetness to it. 8.5/10
Ian McCormick
