Chef/owner Koji Kitamura, who once cooked at Nobu in New York, drives to the Bronx to pick out the freshest fish for his sushi.
By: Tom and Kate O’Neill
Koji Kitamura, the chef/owner of Ajihei, moved from New York to Princeton about seven years ago. During his years working at several New York restaurants, including the high-end Nobu, he began to dream of owning and operating his own small, traditional, Japanese-style sushi place. On Chambers Street in Princeton, he found a pocket-sized cellar space that works well for his specialized menu. He serves little other than sushi (fish or other bite-sized items served on boiled rice sweetened with rice vinegar) and sashimi (artfully sliced raw fish served with condiments).
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Ajihei |
Murals depicting a Japanese landscape with cherry blossoms and mountains wrap around two walls, suggesting a landscape far removed from this space. The restaurant’s priorities are made clear by the contrast between deli-basic wooden furniture and elegant serving platters, plates and serving boards that complement beautifully prepared sushi and sashimi.
The restaurant has only about 24 seats. The counter offers no seating, but the room is small enough that some diners can watch Mr. Kitamura prepare each item as it is ordered. The few hot dishes on the menu are either deep-fried or microwaved and include pork or chicken cutlet and chicken teriyaki ($15-$16).
From the appetizer list, ebi shumai ($4.50) are small shrimp dumplings with transparently thin, delicate wrappers holding a pinch of flavorful diced shrimp. We ordered seaweed/watercress salad and mistakenly received a disappointing seaweed salad ($6) with a fishy taste. A large bowl held an abundance of iceberg-like lettuce and steamed broccoli, garnished with tiny bits of red seaweed. It was served with two dressings: a thin soy dressing and a delightful, robust ginger one that added interest to the dish. Two vegetable croquets ($4.50) were deep-fried in a crunchy panko coating enveloping sweet pureed vegetables. The dense, earthy miso soup ($2.50) was one of the best we’ve tasted and was served in a lacquered bowl, attractively painted in Chinese red and black.
The sushi à la carte menu features several vegetarian selections, all of which were in the form of maki, a long piece of sushi rolled inside nori (sheets of dried seaweed). The avocado and cucumber roll ($4.50) was a sophisticated presentation with sesame seed-dappled rice rolled around slivers of contrasting vegetables. Oshinko ($4) contained crunchy, pleasantly bitter, pickles, while the kampyo roll had a core of intensely sweet dried squash. Umekyo roll combined sour plum and slivers of cucumber, and, as advertised, the plum was indeed sour, overwhelming the cool, crunchy sensation of minced cucumber.
For our entrées, we ordered some more exotic sushi, including delightful kura sushi: a cylinder of dark nori brimming with large orange roe, a combination that could make this the official sushi of Princeton University. We also enjoyed the imaginative dragon roll ($11). It was both spectacular and delicious, with slices of perfectly ripened avocado arranged in an overlapping, dragon scale pattern over a generous slice of sweet smoked eel. To balance our à la carte orders, we ordered the impressive sushi and sashimi entrée ($25), simply presented on a wooden sushi board. It included the chef’s choice of fish: tuna, salmon, scallop and shrimp, whitefish and fatty tuna, with many of the same fish repeated in the sashimi.
At Ajihei, service is willing and friendly, although a language barrier with our obliging server sometimes made it difficult to understand the fine points of a particular dish. It also may have caused confusion between two salad dishes, and our order of green tea, which was never delivered. We brought a bottle of wine with us, and the server placed it in a cooler that was filled with water rather than ice. She promptly filled a request for ice.
We ended our meal with the two dessert options: red bean and green tea ice cream. The latter was bland, almost soapy, while the former combined a bean’s heartiness with a berry flavor.
Mr. Kitamura prides himself on offering sushi in the traditional Japanese tradition and drives to the Bronx twice a week to pick out the freshest fish for his creations. His ideal customers are couples or, at most, groups of four; preparing all orders himself, he cannot keep up with the demands of large groups all wanting food simultaneously. During peak hours (between 6 and 8 p.m. when Princeton University is in session), he will seat only one group of four at a time every 30 minutes to attempt to spread out orders. Due to these necessary restrictions, he assured us Ajihei would never be a family restaurant.

