Café Seiyoken: O Tempura, O Mores

          Let’s take this big old box factory down on some forlorn nowhere side street and turn it into a sort of Art Deco Japanese-Continental brasserie. We can charge an arm and a knee and everyone will come. Crazy? Banzai. Voilà. So nu. Here it is. Café Seiyoken—polymorphic, polystomatous brainchild of 9 creator Tony Tokunaga, born to the trade (his father owned the original Café Seiyoken, in North Korea), yet a classic Horatio Alger (he began his American career as a janitor at the Yamato, in Los Angeles).

          What a folly, is the first reaction. As if the mere epithet “Continental” were not sufficient gastronomic kamikazery. “La maison de la casa house, continental cuisine,” Calvin Trillin describes that bastardized school of cooking. “Is the continent Australia?” he asks. “Or perhaps Antarctica, since everything appears to be frozen?”

          Of course, Café Seiyoken will not be confused with a Continental Trailways bus depot. “Fresh” appears to be a motto here. Still, are we really innocent…relaxed…tolerant…stoned enough to explore steamed mussels in a sake brown sauce, steak charred with miso purée and ginger, julienne of tofu and poached chicken with sesame dressing?

          So what are the night stalkers doing here? Geraldine Stutz and Hanae Mori. Hal Prince tête-à-tête with Stephen Sondheim. Liv Ullmann, Tommy Tune, Allan Carr…the avant-garde modistes Ronaldus Shamask and Thierry Mugler. The right press agent winging them downtown always helps. The pasty-faced pseudo-punks appear, all in black. Fashion harlots and drones follow, as if on some divine homing instinct. Tonight she sports a red beret. He wears a matching blouson. It’s snowy. We’re very après-ski: All eyes swivel to the perky blonde knee high in Lhasa Apso. The Rocky Mountain Sybarite, normally very serious about what he feeds his mouth, is on his sixth foray. He’ll tell you why we’re here. Café Seiyoken is fun. It’s theater. It’s hot. And the food’s not bad at all. Some of it is surprisingly good. This is what La Coupole was trying to be. Here, serious attention to small details—excellent bread from Hoboken, sweet butter in small ramekins, classy barware—real muscle in the kitchen, and verve and discipline in the staff are making it work.

          Even the revolving doors are a work of art. Architect Sam Lopata had the room wrapped in handsome burled wood, with freestanding black steel columns, smart Art Deco fixtures and a mirror (à la Coupole)—vast space skillfully divided. Giant urns of flowers reflect the heroic proportions. And the sushi counter stands on its own, beneath a painting of a whale in an exaggeration of the Japanese style, lit by stage illuminator Ken Billington.

          The sushi chefs themselves are modest and tame by comparison. No classic grunts or martial gyrations. Waiters—male and female in bistro vests and aprons with bow ties to match the zebra-striped chairs—may be theatrical hopefuls. Most non-professional waiters are. If so, they are good actors, playing the waiter role well (except for one rude lout who responded testily to a customer’s observation that he’d served half the group’s appetizers long ago and forgotten the other half’s sushi).

          Granting a no-expectations attitude toward the kitchen—miscegenation makes beautiful people but not necessarily beautiful eating—there are pleasant surprises. Fat fresh mussels in a tasty sake-spiked broth with slivers of orange peel ($4.25). Wonderful broccoli soup ($3.50) and a very respectable puff pastry carrying chicken and leek in a garlic-scented cream ($5.75). Possibly the tenderest calamari ever tasted in tangy seafood à la niçoise ($6.50). A small whole sea bass—delicately cooked just to lose its translucence—boned (but, careful, not totally) and stuffed with julienne of carrot, celery and leek ($14.50).

          If you can accept the marriage of salmon with almonds and raisins in a puddle of melted butter, this salmon is certainly moist and sweet ($14). The duck ($16.50) is tender, faintly pink, flavorful, though the sauce is unremarkable. Lamb chops ($17), big and tasty, are sauced clumsily with too strong a kick of rosemary. But the sirloin ($17.50) is delicious, rare, as requested, winningly seasoned.

          The collision of two cultures is somewhat less successful for my taste. Giant clams in a garlic soy sauce ($5.25) are much too chewy. The whole notion of fried avocado with slivered almonds ($4.75) is probably a mistake. Deep-fried pork cutlets as an entrée ($12.50) with tonkatsu sauce are tentative, too. Tough circlets of battered calamari ($9.50) are teamed with soggy zucchini—faintly Japanese, faintly Italian, a total loss. But an exquisitely tender baked lobster is nicely graced by ginger, scallion, and sesame ($19.50), and the Japanese shiso-haunted pasta with wild mushrooms ($9.50) is a lovely combination that needs only a splash of liquid. As for Manhattan-Japanese classics, aficionados of thin-sliced beef with scallion in teriyaki ($13.50) seem to appreciate a concept I find over-scallioned. Tempura ($11.75) is sadly bland. And sushi at the table, a princely $12, can be splendid or meager, depending, I suspect, on who you are, whether they know you or not, and how pressed the sushi chefs are.

          Not a lot of passion is spent on dessert: ice cream, humble tarts, berries and cream, a listless baked apple (with wonderful plumped raisins), decent chocolate cake—dense and serious or frivolous and creamy “chocolatine,” as the waiter dubbed it—and very good fresh fruit gentled with a dash of honey. Plus superb espresso.

          Lunch has no fashion urgency here. The Gramercy Park and downtown crowds have not yet started to wander this far. Now an assignation at the sushi bar can be splendid. My friend and I decide to favor the rounder of the two chefs—Shiki. “Sushi à la carte,” I say, doing a little inventory for my friend. “We have tuna today, clam, octopus, mackerel, tuna belly, uni…ah, uni.” We smile. Already the chef is cheerfully fashioning little mounds of sticky rice, making sushi of all the creatures I’ve pointed to…luckily, we bridge the communication gap in time to head off quadruples of everything in sight. The fish is impeccably fresh, the clam lushly tender, the rice deftly detonated with fiery wasabi. A request to “do your own creation, please” prompts Shiki to combine avocado and crab with a hint of sesame. “Something with shiso” inspires him to chop that wonderfully pungent leaf and gloriously funky sea urchin (uni), tempered with cooling cucumber and rice, shaping finger rolls that move us to extravagant “um”s and “ah”s.

          “You are numéro uni with me,” my friend congratulates Shiki. He reaches for another knife and begins crafting lace cutouts in a banana leaf, one for each of us.

          Still hungry after $23 worth of sushi, we move to a nearby table. That wonderful bread appears, and a salad of endive cut into spikes in a mustardy vinaigrette ($3.25). Shiki sends over an origami E.T. And then a penguin that stands, cut out of paper with that same serious knife. With dessert, a branch of a tree arrives, slit to hold an intricate origami hawk.

          Serene oasis for lunch, electric at dinner (when disco music may blare)…Café Seiyoken is fun, as the Rocky Mountain Sybarite said. And given the odds for cuisinary contentment so far observed, you don’t have to suffer heartburn or insult for your pleasure.

 Café Seiyoken, 18 West 18^th Street (620-9010).