Review: Hana Sushi Shines in Hampden

Baltimore has always been a seafood town, thanks to our generations-long love affair with crab cakes and coddies, soft-shells and crab boils, oysters, and lake trout. But it’s never had a lot of options for good sushi, which means that the January opening of Hana Sushi in Hampden came as terrific news.

Hana is the second sushi restaurant from owner Tina Chen, who opened Yama Sushi in Ellicott City in 2019 with her husband, Denny. It brings not only excellent sushi to Hampden’s 36th Street restaurant row, but also a menu of superlative ramen and yakitori, as well as an outstanding bar and cocktail program.

A pale-colored, light-filled restaurant in the corner spot that was once the late, lamented Souvlaki, Hana is the kind of one-stop Japanese restaurant this city needs. The dining room is anchored by a big, open sushi bar filled with beautiful fish shipped daily from Tokyo and helmed by veteran sushi chef Jackie Nakazima Eizi.

In addition to nigiri, sashimi, and rolls, the menu includes tonkotsu ramen made by Denny, as well as yakitori (the grilled meat skewers popularized in izakaya restaurants), gyoza, tempura, tofu, and Hana “tacos,” which are flour tortillas filled with raw fish or tofu.

There is also a little market corner, stocked with Japanese items like Pocky, instant ramen, and matcha Kit Kats, which is not only seriously adorable but means we don’t have to trek to Catonsville’s H-Mart for candy runs.

Having helmed her Ellicott City restaurant for seven years before opening Hana, Chen knows what she’s doing. The fish is the most important aspect of a good sushi place, and she gets hers—toro, yellowtail, salmon, eel, Hokkaido scallops and uni, octopus, and mackerel—daily via Jessup seafood supplier True World Foods, which flies it directly from Tokyo.

And then there’s the necessity of a sushi chef who knows what to do with all this lovely stuff. Nakazima Eizi, born, bred, and trained in Tokyo, has 45 years of experience as a sushi chef, and ran Yama Sushi’s sushi bar before moving over to open Hana. With a white chef’s cap and a welcoming smile, he operates his new sushi bar with precision, artistry, and grace.

Hana’s offerings are wide-ranging and include many tricked-out rolls, like the Edgar Allan Roe, composed of shrimp, burdock root, roe, avocado, yuzu, and chile oil, as well as others featuring crab, spicy tuna, shrimp tempura, eel, shiso and even truffled soy sauce.

Though these are fun and gorgeous, it’s the simpler nigiri sushi that allows Nakazima Eizi’s skills to shine. The eel nigiri is a succulent combination of broiled eel atop perfectly articulated rice, wrapped with a ribbon of nori, dusted with sesame seeds and a bit of sauce. And the seared salmon belly nigiri is a masterful rendition, a curl of fatty salmon draped over a nub of rice that Nakajima Eizi fires with a culinary torch so that it partially melts.

All this can be washed down with a small cup of green tea, but that would mean that you’d miss out on the excellent, highly creative cocktail program. As one would expect, there’s a large sake section, as well as Japanese beers, but there’s also an impressive whiskey list of both the American and Japanese varieties (spelled without the “e”), including bottles from Nikka and Yamazaki distillers, as well as Suntory (see: Bill Murray’s booze commercials in Lost In Translation).

And then there are those cocktails, an inventive collection that makes use of not only all the available spirits, but also ingredients like shiso, lychee, ginger, and nori. Nothing like A Night in Shinjuku—Nikka whisky, cognac, dry vermouth, amaro, maraschino, and angustura—to help wash down your double toro roll (maybe the best roll on the menu) and pork belly yakitori.

Tina and Denny are both Chinese, not Japanese, but their love of Japanese cuisine is a long and storied one. They met in Japan, where Denny was studying and where Gina lived for seven years and where they both came to love the food of the country.

While Tina runs the front of house at both restaurants, Denny is at home in the kitchen, making all the sauces and the broth for the ramen, a 10-hour-long production for the tonkotsu (there are also miso and shoyu versions).

And the ramen is terrific: milky, luscious soup paired with twisty noodles, thick slabs of pork, small mounds of grilled corn, and crucially, a perfectly cooked jammy egg. Because for lovers of ramen, there is nothing as telling as that egg, seemingly one of the easiest components of a good bowl of ramen, but often bafflingly overlooked. (The bowl of tonkotsu I recently had at one Baltimore ramen-ya came with a hard-boiled egg, something that almost made me cry.)

Discovering Hana’s ramen, as well as its fantastic sushi, has restored both my palate and my faith that if you build great sushi, Baltimore’s seafood lovers will come.

HANA SUSHI: 1103 W. 36th St., Hampden, 443-869-2503. HOURS: Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-10 p.m. PRICES: Starters, sides, yakitori: $4-18; ramen: $20; sushi, sashimi, and rolls: $7-32. AMBIANCE: Cozy, light-filled neighborhood spot.