My third Westport Restaurant Week visit found me taking lunch at Matsu Sushi.
A beautiful sunny day, lately the exception rather than the rule, highlighted this view of the Saugatuck River being flooded by a rising tide.
At Matsu Sushi, a warm welcome is guaranteed whoever is manning the phone or hostess station.
Arriving on the early end, I found the sushi chefs preparing for the noontime onslaught.
I sat down for lunch with Isabel Tartaglia, co-owner of RestaurantsCT.com, shown here with charming Matsu Sushi manager Pauline Lee.
Isabel and I noted that the restaurant featured quite an array of sakes,
Feeling a little blue, we tried saketinis (reduced from $9 to $6).
There were plenty of specials from which to choose,
but we had come for the Westport Restaurant Week menu. Matsu Sushi’s Restaurant Week specials were an enticing lot. The restaurant chose the lower price point for lunch ($15 rather than $20), and then put together a menu that most would find worth a great deal more. From five lunch appetizers, we tried the harumaki,
greaseless slant-cut spring rolls which were filled with crab and other delights. We also tried the chicken satay,
and were pleased to find that not only was it served with a complex peanut sauce but the chicken was delicious on its own because it was beautifully marinated. (Too many dubious restaurants just serve plain unadulterated chicken strips with peanut sauce and call them satay.) And we got to try a third appetizer from the seven-choice dinner menu, this lovely spicy salmon skin salad
that’s likely to bring me back to Matsu Sushi again and again.
Eight lunch entrées were offered, including sushi, sashimi, a maki combo, shrimp and vegetable tempura, hibachi chicken, hibachi chicken fried noodle, beef teriyaki and salmon teriyaki. The two we tried were the sashimi (upgraded from tuna to toro), which was stunningly fresh,
and the salmon teriyaki,
which was also delicious.
On top of that, we couldn’t resist trying this fancy roll capped with wasabi-flavored tobiko.
Three desserts were available to Restaurant Week visitors.
Here are close-ups of the mochi ice cream (its thin skin of glutinous rice allows one to hold the ice cream in one’s hand),
the lychee pudding (mango and honeydew flavors were also offered),
and the fried cheesecake,
all of which Isabel and I can vouch for.
I looked over Matsu Sushi’s Restaurant Week dinner menu as well. As with lunch, the restaurant chose the lower price point ($25 rather than $35). Its appetizer choices included miso soup, onion soup, green salad, harumaki, chicken satay, agedashi tofu, and of course, salmon skin salad. Its entrée choices included a sashimi dinner, a sushi dinner, a spicy maki combo, hibachi chicken, shrimp and vegetable tempura, “seafood Malony,” seafood teriyaki, a tuna steak, a miso steak and a lamb chop.
Being restless and snoopy (and those are my good traits), I wandered upstairs, where I found this space perfect for a party or for an overflow of regular diners.
The view underscored how busy the restaurant was for a Monday lunch,
and how correspondingly busy the sushi chefs were.
In actuality, I’m an old softie. It became increasingly clear, as Restaurant Week progressed, that Westport is a family town. I saw babies everywhere, and I was inevitably drawn to them.
Matsu Sushi Japanese Restaurant, 33 Jesup Road, Westport, 203-341-9662