One of the keys to a restaurant’s survival in these parts is its viability as a business lunch venue. Surely this has helped Satsuma Japanese Restaurant succeed for two decades: the combination of menu variety, plenty of seating, brisk but welcoming service, and consistent quality keeps the place humming with regulars and their clients.
Satsuma’s convenient location — near the interchange of El Camino Real and Highway 85 — also keeps it bustling for dinner. (Not to mention the giant new Camino Medical Group facility next door contributing customers.) Large and open with just a few, well-placed pieces of art, Satsuma has seating at tables, a sushi bar, and semi-private, Japanese-style tables where you remove your shoes to dine. I wouldn’t recommend Satsuma for a quiet date because the popular place gets quite loud, but families and large groups abound.
The menu is huge, with choices from Nabemono (simmering one-pot dishes popular in wintertime in Japan) to katsu (cutlets), yakimono (grilled meats), udon (noodle bowls) and tempura (deep fried foods in a light batter). But Satsuma is ultimately a sushi restaurant, with most of the menu devoted to it.
So sushi is where we kicked things off during a recent lunch, trying maguro nigiri sushi ($4.75), fingers of raw tuna over vinegary rice. Maguro is usually bluefin, and here it was fresh and good. Many of the special rolls at Satsuma are inside-out (uramaki) style like a California roll, with rice on the outside instead of seaweed (nori).
The special spider roll ($8.95) is cut into about eight pieces of deep-fried soft shell crab rolled with avocado and cucumber, and topped with beautiful, coppery flying fish roe. Very attractively laid out, with decorative fried crab legs poking out of the top, it tasted as good as it looked.
Going all-out at dinner, we ordered the nigiri sushi dinner entree ($19.25), 10 different pieces of fish on rice, which ranged from very good to not-the-best. It included eel (good), salmon (decent), tuna (not the best), shrimp (great), octopus (great), herring with roe (an acquired taste?), and red snapper (good), as well as a very savory miso soup ($2 as a side dish). If you want rice and salad with your meal, go for the Bento box choices. Most of the sushi we ate was good, with only a couple pieces that should have been fresher.
The special spring roll ($9.95) was an unusual one: salmon, tuna, avocado, cucumbers and lettuce wrapped in bean paper dotted with sesame seeds, seasoned with what tastes like Sriracha sauce. The salmon was falling apart, and perhaps not the best, but the roll was still good; it’s hard to taste each ingredient distinctly with that much going on in one roll.
Sasuma also serves chirashi sushi (rice bowl with fish and usually other ingredients on top), sashimi (simple slices of raw fish), and, if you request them, temaki sushi (conical hand rolls, rolled in nori).
But you don’t have to eat sushi to enjoy eating here; we started one meal with salted edamame, not sea life. I confess the first time I tried edamame ($4.25) I wasn’t a fan of the green soy beans. But then, nobody told me to pop the beans out of the pod before eating them. Sure, that means less fiber, but I do like them better now.
The gyoza ($4.95) are like pot stickers or fried dumplings; very good, and a big hit with small children since they balance the right amount of crunch with tenderness, packing lots of flavor into an easy-to-eat-with-small-hands shape.
The oyako udon, a chicken and vegetable soup with thick udon noodles, tastes like it could use a fish sauce or paste for flavoring. It has big chunks of egg and chicken, and is quite filling. The beef sukiyaki ($14.95 with salad) is sweet, as usual, but its meat wasn’t as good as in the oyako udon — more stringy and fatty.
Children not ready for sushi can choose teriyaki dinners ($7.95). We saw one of the chicken teriyaki dinners arrive on the back of a bright red fire truck platter. It seemed like a terrific idea for about a minute; then the child did the most obvious thing a small child would: revved the truck along the table until it smacked a second plate off the table.
No matter how often this kind of thing happens, the restaurant is clean and tidy, and the staff as friendly toward tykes as to tab-paying adults.
Satsuma offers daily specials, and on Sundays from 5 to 9 p.m. there’s an all-you-can-eat rolls menu for $19.95. You’re sure to find a sake to go with it from the drinks list, but if not, there’s beer (such as Asahi for $3.95), a few wines, soda, juice and tea.
Certainly one of the best things about Satsuma is the top-notch service, with plenty of welcoming attention, even during busy times. And although it’s best known as a sushi restaurant, it’s also an easy and inexpensive place to try just a few pieces alongside a grilled entree, for example. If you want a more intimate space, perhaps a place like Yakko is a better fit — but you’ll never beat the service.
Satsuma Restaurant
705 E. El Camino Real, Mountain View
(650) 966-1122
www.satsumasushi.com
Hours:
Lunch: Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
Dinner: Monday-Sunday 5-10 p.m.
