Qor

Qor

Cuisine: very good sushi and more from Japan
Athens Area: northern suburbs, Kifissia
Decor: Modern, big, black and brick interior, thumping with music
Service: Friendly and accomodating
Wine List: Good
Prices: 45-55 euro a person with limited alcohol
Address: Ag. Tryfonos & Omirou 18, Kifissia, Tel. 210-8011117

What a heart-warming sight: A full restaurant (restaurant, not taverna) on a Wednesday night, big, noisy, modern, thumping with music, six-inch Kifissia heels, and the heartbeats of more than a few males sitting across from more than a few females in low-cut shirts. For a second it felt like the 1990s all over again, when warehouse-size spaces were transformed into expensive eateries, when the dice rolled high and everyone drove a brand new Cherokee Jeep. But it isn’t the ‘90s all over again and it won’t be any time soon. Are the northern suburbs immune to crisis? QOR, the latest sushi restaurant, seems to go against the tide, with encouraging success.

QOR is big, with a black and brick interior, shiny orange banquettes against the walls, a semi-open kitchen and a wall behind the bar filled to the brim with Scandinavian water in those tube-like designer bottles. Another wall houses bottles like a wine cellar might, except that they are stacked asymmetrically, making me wonder if the idea, which I like, is conceptual art or actually has some practical application. Our waitress was very friendly and accommodating and polite, and, she actually knew the menu, describing dishes in commendable detail. Could it be that people actually come to QOR not to see and be seen (there’s a lot of that, too, here), but because the service is pretty good, the sushi some of the best in town, and the place lively and fun?

It takes courage to open a sushi bar these days, as the fad wanes somewhat and the craze—so ‘90s “we want it all” is more or less over. I can honestly say –I haven’t been to Nobu yet—that I probably haven’t had fresher fish and better carved sushi anywhere in Athens. There is also a certain originality to many of the choices. QOR does market itself as a “fusion” restaurant—again, soooooo ‘90s, but that it isn’t. This is Japanese food in full, with flair and elegance and the prices to match, expensive but not outrageously so, given the high food cost of sea creatures these days.

The menu is very big: starters, rolls big, medium, and small, gunkani (boat-shaped sushi), temaki (hand rolls), cirashi (bowls of rice and sushi), carpaccio (therein lay the fusion?), sashimi, nigiri, noodles, soups, rice dishes, salads, tempura and a wide selection of grilled dishes make it hard to decide what to order. We settled on the chef’s special sushi-sashimi platter, 18 pieces, 28 euro. The fish was very fresh and the sashimi—raw fish without rice—was beautifully cut. But the selection was not so “special”—the usual array of salmon, tuna, lavraki (sea bass), and a few rolls. We loved the spicy tuna gunkani, a boat-shaped seaweed-wrapped, bite-sized piece filled with chopped tuna in a spicy dressing. I also really liked the dragon roll, although we paid dearly for it at 24 euro: rice on the outside, dotted with tiny fish eggs and stuffed with eel and avocado. The whole presentation was artful and the rolls delicious. The equally expensive tiger rolls, also made of an outer layer of rice, but filled with shrimp tempura and brik, were less successful because the fried shrimp had an oily tang to it that distracted from what should have been crystal clear tastes. There is certainly a lot to choose from at QOR, even for meat lovers. Although the price tag—50 euro each, about 17 euro of which was the combined price of a glass of pino grigio and a Jack Daniels, was not exactly cheap, in lesser places I’ve spent the same. The decibel level is a little too loud for me, but the overall experience was more than pleasant.