Author: Kiki Aranita

Oroshi Sushi Omakase opened on Broad Street last month, with startlingly low prices for the elegant format, where chefs slice fish and gently coax rice into nigiri, one piece at a time. Each nigiri constitutes one course in omakase dining.

Oroshi, which means “grated” in Japanese, serves omakases at dinner service at $68 for 15 courses, and lunch, for $48 and 10 courses (prices throughout this article are not inclusive of tax and tip). Dinner takes precisely 90 minutes and lunch takes 60 minutes.

The numbers are shockingly low even compared with other affordable omakases in town. Kichi in Washington Square West serves a tightly timed 15-course “zoomakase” which starts at $95 and Kissho House’s 18-course omakase, which costs $150.

Omakase deals can also be had at Uchi, whose happy hour omakase (served between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. daily) costs $60 for nine courses. Oroshi’s omakase is even cheaper than the one at Yuhiro in Fishtown, which costs $78 per person and also takes 90 minutes to serve 15 courses. Most sushi restaurants in Oroshi’s price range focus on rolls and takeout, neither of which is available there.

Yuhiro is also where Oroshi general manager Jahang Zhang, 29, met chef Leo Liu, 27. Together, they run Oroshi, along with recently hired 27-year-old sushi chef Ming Lee (he also goes by Leo), who just moved to Philadelphia from New York City two weeks ago.

Oroshi is funded by a private investor, who was also once a sushi chef.

Liu, whose father was also a sushi chef, most recently worked at Hiroki (where the omakase costs $195 before a mandatory 20% service charge). Both he and Zhang were determined to share the omakase format and make it more approachable.

“I have worked in sushi restaurants since I was a kid — since I was about 14 years old. My dream was to open a sushi restaurant,” said Zhang, who worked every position in family-owned sushi restaurants at places like Rayaki in Franklin Mills and Sushi Man in Huntingdon Valley before going to manage Yuhiro, where Liu was working as a sushi chef.

The “zoomakase” trend, where single pieces of nigiri are served at a rapid pace and at much lower prices than traditional omakases, has been pervasive in New York, especially on the Lower East Side. But here in Philly, it never really took off. Just like the hand roll or temaki trend overwhelmed New York, but exists only in pockets here.

Oroshi isn‘t skimping on ingredients to make their pricing work, flying in fresh fish and wagyu from Japan like the other omakase-focused restaurants in Philly.

On a recent night, the mist of gold glitter that Liu sprayed upon the otoro nigiri with caviar met with gasps of glee. (Indeed, there is caviar at Oroshi, though a very small amount.) Oroshi is also playful: a nigiri on their opening menu that they’ve since phased out consisted of premium Bakkafrost salmon from Scotland, topped with mayonnaise and a tiny square of Kraft American cheese that was torched multiple times.

At Oroshi, the lights are bright and the decor is spare. There are sake bottles and framed wagyu certifications behind the sushi bar. The former is just for decoration, as Oroshi is a BYOB. The latter is legitimate, indicative of the quality of their ingredients.

It’s not a place to linger, but they will allow for add-ons so you can repeat your favorite pieces of nigiri and these range between $7 to $14 per piece. Salmon, for instance, is $7. Otoro, or the most prized and fatty cut of tuna, is $14 a la carte. That same otoro nigiri add-on at Royal Sushi? $35.

Oroshi Sushi Omakase, 425 S Broad St., oroshisushiomakase.com. Hours: 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, 4:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 4:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Right now, black walnuts look like small neon green tennis balls clustered on a branch. Their interiors are creamy and gelatinous.

Danny Childs, the founder of Slow Drinks — who is currently in the midst of opening his first cocktail bar, Field Day — uses black walnuts in this state for black walnut nocino, a variant of the bittersweet Italian liqueur known as amaro. “When I make amari in general, it’s always a way to showcase a certain place at a certain time,” said Childs, who forages his black walnuts from a running trail in Merchantville.

“When you’re making nocino, you pick them in June,” Childs said. “The knife can easily pierce the black walnut, as the actual nut hasn’t formed yet. It’s still a jellylike substance.”

Childs uses 151 proof vodka from Devil’s Springs in New Jersey to macerate his walnuts. His black walnut nocino is also on the menu at Almanac, featured in its cocktail the Juban District. It’s blended with Japanese whiskey, scotch, vermouth, Okinawan Kokuto brown sugar, and bitters. It’s funky and savory, and sweet without being cloying. And it has become a classic cocktail on Almanac’s menu.

And so, the Almanac team has also just gone foraging for black walnuts.

At Field Day, Childs’ black walnut repertoire will expand. “We’re going to start using the walnuts in other ways after nocino this year — to infuse wine to make nociato, and then use them to make black walnut miso.” He’s working with fermenter Jamaar Julal, previously of Honeysuckle, on these projects.

Look closely, and you’ll start to see black walnuts everywhere, from shortbread cookies at Ellen Yin’s Bread Room to Randy Rucker’s sauces for seafood at Little Water.

Crisped up in a pan, the Heavy Metal Sausage’s mortadella, inlaid with cubes of smoked pork jowl and hard toasted black walnuts, emits a heady aroma of pork and socks. It is funky, distinctive, and heavenly; it tastes milder than its scent, like uncured bacon that had nestled next to a blue cheese for a few days in the fridge.

Pat Alfiero, Heavy Metal’s co-owner and butcher, sources shelled black walnuts from Ian Brendle of Green Meadow Farm in Gap, Pa., who has about 100 black walnut trees on his property. Brendle also functions as a middleman, shuttling nutmeats processed just south of Pennsylvania to chefs.

“To me, black walnuts are unique, like pawpaws. If you had a hundred people eat them, half would like them and half would hate them. Pawpaws have the same unctuous floral perfume as black walnuts,” said Brendle, who now sells five to 10 pounds of shelled black walnuts every week, twice as much as when he started selling them two decades ago.

“They’re a misunderstood tree nut, for sure. But any nut or plant that can be foraged sustainably should be consumed. Anytime you can consume something that doesn’t require immense amounts of water or makes a negative impact is a step in the right direction,” said Brendle.

Black walnut trees are found in dense thickets in Fairmount Park, and on practically every farm and expansive backyard in and around Philadelphia. They’re native to the Mid-Atlantic, like hickory nuts and pecans. They swath the East Coast, growing as far north as the border with Ontario and as far south as Florida.

Every part of the black walnut contains juglone, which is toxic to many other plants, but perfectly safe for humans and animals to consume. For many gardeners and homeowners, black walnuts are a nuisance, staining hands if you gather them without gloves on, as well as the asphalt driveways on which they fall. The nuts get caught in lawn mowers and can also be dangerous projectiles, falling from great heights — the trees can grow up to 80 feet tall — denting car roofs and unlucky heads.

If nuts could talk, black walnuts would say, “No one likes us, we don’t care.”

For Alfiero, Brendle, and the others, there is an urgency to using black walnuts. Nut farming is water intensive, and the almond industry in California has repeatedly come under scrutiny for its groundwater consumption. The walnuts in a typical supermarket are the Persian or English variety. In the U.S., 99% of them also come from California. It takes about 26.7 gallons of water to grow an ounce of English walnuts.

“We’ve created so many problems for ourselves in the world, simply by being spoiled and being able to purchase, say, pistachios at the store. People grow almonds and other nuts in places that don’t naturally have a lot of water. We’ve created a market for things that don’t make sense,” said Jeremiah Langhorne of the Dabney in Washington, one of the chefs responsible for the black walnut’s current popularity on menus up and down the Northeast Corridor.

While the nuts, shelled and toasted or raw, may not be as snackable as the more common English varieties, they have a wide range of uses among Indigenous populations.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, wrote, “The hickories, black walnuts, and butternuts of our northern homelands have their own specific names. But those trees, like the homelands, were lost to my people.”

Though Native Americans carried black walnuts and other related nuts with them as they were displaced, “The federal government’s Indian Removal policies wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands. It separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants,” Kimmerer writes.

Native peoples were divorced from their trees, and now, chefs, distillers, and foragers are trying to form new bridges with the same wild trees.

How to use black walnuts throughout the year:

Early spring to summer: Gather the leaves

“Use the leaves in early spring when they’re just the size of squirrel’s ears,” said Robert Gustafson, a Virginia-based specialist in wild foods. This is when they can be blended and fermented into sauces.

“Our entire goal is to find what grows well around us, and be receptive to working with it,” said Isaiah Billington, who along with Sarah Conezio, is the co-owner of Keepwell Vinegar and White Rose Miso, based in Dover.

“Our black walnut bay sauce is like a Worcestershire sauce with a base made from our own apple cider vinegar,” said Billington. The recipe was unearthed from a cookbook first published in 1879 and adapted by Langhorne. It’s aged for a year with ginger, garlic, horseradish, and black walnut leaves, which Billington harvests himself. The leaves give the sauce a mildly bitter, herbal flavor. Billington had become enamored with the sauce while working at the Dabney, which now purchases it from Keepwell instead of making it in house.

Early fall: Recognizably walnuts

“This is harvest season for storehouse wild foods,” said forager Heather McMonnies, who collects the nuts using an apple picker. “This is the same time you’d collect chestnuts or hickory nuts.”

Late fall: Clogging up people’s driveways

Gardeners and homeowners are annoyed by them as far north as Canada. Making use of them culinarily can keep tons of them out of landfills.

Winter: Cheers!

It’s time to crack open that black walnut nocino that started in the summer and drink it.

Late winter and early spring: Tap the trees

“My kids got tired of homemade maple syrup and well, I have black walnut trees, and we may as well tap them and see what we get,” said McMonnies. After boiling 40 gallons of sap, sweet and molasses-like in color, she produced one gallon of black walnut syrup, incredibly light in structure and composition, with a tinge of the nut’s signature funk.

Black walnuts are divisive, but so is Stilton cheese, durian, fermented tofu, and any number of delicious things. Does divisiveness make black walnuts any less distinguished?

Winners Ice Cream has only been open three weeks, but its wall is already completely covered with notes from neighbors. The small shop was packed on a recent, hot Thursday evening, as customers of all ages lined up for scoops of nostalgic flavors with winning-themed names like “MVPeanut Butter Crunch,” “Champ Chocolate,” and “Sweet Success ‘Smores.” They were invited to leave Post-It notes on the wall that detailed their own personal wins.

These notes ranged from “I’m getting married” to “Published my first book” to “I ate breakfast.”

This is owner Anh Nguyen‘s first shop. The 31-year-old, originally from Newark, Del., moved to Philly to manage branches of Surreal Creamery for the four years prior to his opening Winners.

Winners is so named because “we celebrate small wins, big wins, and all the wins in between with fantastic ice cream,” said Nguyen.

Nguyen built a production kitchen downstairs, where all his ice creams are made from a 14% buttermilk base. Although he is the sole proprietor, his family has been actively involved with helping him get Winners off the ground. His father helped with construction and his mother kept the crew fed while they spent hours at the shop “putting things together with hammer and nails. And since we’re Vietnamese, she always packed us jasmine rice with eggs, pork, or sautéed chicken.”

It took Nguyen and his father about a month and a half to build out the space. His three sisters have weighed in heavily, testing flavors and helping source ingredients. Nguyen currently makes 14 flavors of ice cream, with more in development, including “Match Point Matcha” (“All the flavors are winning themed,” he said) since the green tea flavor is so popular.

His current personal favorite? “Major Mint Chip, which I make by infusing fresh mint leaves into the ice cream base, and letting it steep overnight. I didn’t want to use extracts or food colorings in any of my ice creams.”

The flavor has crushed Girl Scout cookies (Thin Mints, of course) because Nguyen’s niece is a Girl Scout. To support her during cookie sales, he bought cases upon cases of cookies.

Winners, as well as Mod Spuds, which opened a week and a half prior to the ice cream shop, contributes greatly to “little treat culture” in the neighborhood. And they also share a similar aesthetic, because they share the same muralist. Nguyen peeked into Ange Branca’s Mod Spuds, a few feet away and also on South Street, noticed their painted walls, and asked to be connected with the artist, Hana Alshahab, who ended up painting the wall at Winners.

Winners is a dream come true for Nguyen, who has loved hard-scoop ice cream since he was a child. “You can add mix-ins to hard scoop and make flavors that are more out of the box, unlike with soft serve where the mix-ins won’t fit through the tube of soft serve machines.”

Most importantly, “I want Winners to be a community space to recognize and celebrate the moments in life that are often overlooked. Small wins can add up to big wins. I look at the wall and I get inspired and emotional,” said Nguyen.

In the sea of slips of paper denoting other peoples’ wins, one yellow one could easily be missed. It reads, “I opened an ice cream shop!”

“That one was mine,” said Nguyen.

Winners Ice Cream is at 1610 South St. It’s open from noon to 10 p.m. daily. Single scoops served in cups start at $5.75.