It wasn’t that long ago that the greater Richmond area had only one place to go for sushi. Now, it’s everywhere, even at local grocery stores. But the area now has one place for truly great sushi: Umi Sushi Bistro, in the Promenade Shops in Henrico County’s expanding Short Pump area.
Umi is the Japanese word for “sea,” a theme that moves through the atmosphere at Umi Sushi Bistro like the great Kuroshio Current that flows around the shores of Japan. On an unseasonably warm day in June, after walking from the parking lot past the half-dozen patio tables on the sidewalk, I opened the front door of Umi, stepped inside, and was overcome with the feeling of wading into the soothing coolness of the ocean in summertime. The air was crisp, the lighting subdued, the walls painted a deep blue at the top fading to black toward the bottom, a flash of purple here, a fleck of green there.
There is no artwork on the walls of the Umi dining room. But a single, large painting—a traditional Japanese maritime scene of a small fishing vessel being tossed about on a large, curling wave—is suspended off- center behind the sushi bar, where it radiates a kind of cool, kinetic energy and color scheme throughout the place. In the dining room, directed lights dissolve their incandescent glow off the blue-black-purple walls the way sunlight dissolves into the ocean.
I focus on these details because in their stark, pure beauty, their negative space and abstraction, they convey the essence of the experience of sushi, which is ultimately the essence of Umi.
Sushi is art like no other food is art. There is a raw purity to the ingredients, an exacting rigor to the preparation, an honor to the process, similar to the now-forgotten compulsory exercises required of Olympic figure skaters. It’s the removal of fluff and distraction around something to get at the essence of the thing itself. There are no sauces to mask an imperfect cut or yesterday’s fresh fish. There is only the fish— the thing—itself.
At Umi, the quality begins with ingredients that can be measured in one simple test: examine the salmon. Gorgeous color, stout firmness, a clear and bright zebralike pattern of fatty tissue, and as soft as warm butter: I have never had such an astoundingly rich cut of sushi-grade salmon. The tuna was just as good, cut with such careful attention that its veins formed a symmetrical pattern reminiscent of a ginkgo leaf.
Since this was my first time here, I ordered one of the specialties: the Richmond roll, a remarkable assembly of shrimp tempura, rice, and avocado rolled up and topped with eel and caviar—sort of the turducken of sushi. Usually I avoid this sort of nod-to- location type of dish. But I will be ordering this remarkable roll again and again as I make Umi a regular habit. A new treat for me was the blackened tuna sashimi: a slice of tuna, the top of which was rubbed with Cajun blackening spices, pinned to a tuft of shredded daikon by a spear made from a shard of bamboo.
An ocean harvest constitutes the rest of the menu: for the adventurous there is mirugai (giant clam), baby octopus salad, and jelly- fish salad. But for those whose standards require only unparalleled attention to detail, quality, and freshness, there are over 30 kinds of rolls, bento lunchboxes, tempura, and sushi restaurant standards.
While Umi may be easy to overlook—its sign is a visually efficient three letters in a cool but tricky mod script—this is one place to make sure you lock down in your GPS. Because if you go once, like the ocean tide, you will keep coming back.
