Sake Lounge dances into Olathe
My ship came in last week.
It was a wooden boat on wheels, maybe a foot long, with a green, battery-operated light. Its cargo: five sushi rolls.
OK, so we’re not talking about the kind of vessel that inspires songs like Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s “My Ship,” but the scale was perfectly fine for that night’s soundtrack: Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which played in the background as the rolls arrived.
At the six-month-old Sake Lounge in Olathe, the word fusion doesn’t refer merely to the multicultural cuisine (Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Malaysian — give or take some Buffalo wings) but also to the décor and the music. (And the liquor — one recent drink special was a sake sangria.) In a different time and city, Sean Lin might have referred to his bar and restaurant as a disco. The saloon side of the mammoth space has a dance floor large enough to shoot an episode of Dancing with the Stars, with a lighting rig that seems ready for network TV. Lin has stopped shy of installing the kind of illuminated dance floor that changed colors in Saturday Night Fever, but the bar itself is translucent and goes from yellow to green to magenta faster than you can slap your hand down on it and demand a mai tai.
“People come here on Friday and Saturdays to dance,” a waitress informed me after I peeked behind a curtain to scan the lounge side of the business. “We have a disc jockey.”
I asked her if the DJ played Asian pop tunes. After all, Sake Lounge bills itself as “Sushi Asian Fusion.” She shook her head and said, “American music.”
My dining companion chided me. “Why would you even ask that? This place is in an Olathe shopping center, not Hong Kong.”
Well, when the lighting is right, some restaurants work anywhere. And Sake Lounge wouldn’t feel terribly out of place in Macau or New York. Or Wichita. Anywhere people go to dance, drink and eat a Godzilla roll.
A friend of mine is crazy about the place. “It’s really weird,” he told me. “And I mean that in a good way.”
Eccentric might be a better word, particularly where the cuisine is concerned. At Sake, I tasted my first — and my last — Spanish spring roll. Some things shouldn’t be enclosed in a sheath of wonton wrapper and deep-fried. Among those things: goat cheese and fresh spinach. Some fusions are best left to the imagination.
But let’s give Lin, who owns the restaurant and is one of its sushi chefs, his due. When Sake Lounge is on its game, the food here is worthwhile. A dish of Thai-basil steak was exquisitely tender and glazed with a shiny, fragrant sauce that was tingly spicy rather than fiery. I’ve also eaten an exceptional red-curry stew here. Served in a rustic earthenware pot, it came deftly spiced with chili-based sambal, and was creamy with soothing coconut milk and loaded with broccoli, green beans, mushrooms and squash.
Far from deft, on the other hand, was a sub-buffet plate of glossy General Tso’s chicken, overcooked and far too chewy.
Sake’s menu, as these contrasts suggest, is formidably large, with ingredients deployed in a variety of complementary dishes. Crispy tempura-battered bananas can be ordered as a dessert with whipped cream or as a component of the Paradise sushi roll; the latter is fried fruit with lobster salad and fried shrimp enfolded in soybean paper and dappled with a yuzu mango sauce. It sounds busy but it works, balancing cool and hot, soft and crunchy.
A different shade of soy paper — baby pink — is the coy wrapper for the Sex and the City roll: tempura-battered eel, succulent spicy tuna and chunks of fresh avocado. Sushi (most of it in versions less phallic than that) is meant to be the signature dish here, and there are plenty of tempura rolls, raw rolls, cooked rolls, nigiri and sashimi to be had. But Lin also makes 13 familiar Chinese dishes (pepper steak, orange beef, the Happy Family combo), and the half-dozen noodle possibilities include a first-rate pad Thai (made with thicker than usual rice noodles) and a bowl of ropy udon wheat noodles.
Mercifully, no teppan-yaki grill is on the premises. Between the sushi chefs doing their thing in the center of the dining room and the computer-driven light extravaganza over at the dance floor, Sake has more than enough theatrics without attempting the old breaking-eggs-flying-shrimp routine. Hibachi-style dishes are available, but they’re prepared offstage, in the kitchen.
The service is pretty slick, though on my first visit, one of the waitresses came over twice with dishes that another table had ordered. The lighting is so dim in the dining room that it must be difficult to maneuver with any sense of confidence. I got lost just trying to find my way back to the table from the restroom.
I was hoping to see some Dance Fever action in the lounge on my second visit, on a Friday night. As at the discos in the 1980s, though, Sake doesn’t start shaking its groove thing until after 10 p.m. That’s what the waitress told us, anyway.
“We could stay,” my dining companion said. “We could sit at the bar until things started happening.”
Two glum-looking people sat at the bar, a sad counterpoint to the circuslike colors rotating under their drinks. Maybe they, too, were waiting for something to happen. I wasn’t in the mood. It would take more than one or two sake sangrias for me to see hope in a mostly empty Olathe bar. I’d eaten some good food, and now the little green lights on top of the sushi boats were giving me a message: Go.
