Seadog Sushi Bar - Wicker Park

We just had dinner at Seadog Sushi Bar http://www.seadogsushibar.com/, 1500 W Division Ave. It seems the restaurant has been open for about a month now. The restaurant has a modern, brick wall interior, with a fabulous stone floor. The place was completely packed when we arrived at 8:30 pm on Friday night. We started with two orders of the hamachi carpaccio and the seaweed salad. The carpaccio was very good (not quite as good as the carpaccio at Coast in Bucktown), but simple and flavorful nonetheless. They used just the right amount of chili oil and lime juice, although there was an unexpected faint sweetness in the dish, which was a little distracting, it made the dish quite memorable. Each serving included four reasonably sized pieces of lovely hamachi topped with jalapeno. A good value for $10. The seaweed salad was better than most I've had in Chicago...sometimes the preparation gets a little too slimy and some sushi restaurants tend to overload the dressing with sugar and sesame oil, not here, they did an excellent job keeping the sauce light and emphasizing the freshness and texture of the wakame seaweed.

For nigiri we ordered the maguro, sake, fatty hamachi, sweet ebi, and super white tuna. I was absolutely floored by how large the cuts of fish were. The servings were so generous that the pieces were almost twice as big as the rice portion beneath them. The fatty hamachi was incredible, superb flavor, texture, and freshness...delightful. The sake was a bit too lean for my liking, but I enjoyed it, and the thinly marbled cut looked perfect. The group really enjoyed the sweet shrimp, although I don't really care for this style of nigiri; I prefer to save room for good stuff like uni.

Speaking of uni, we requested uni when we arrived and the chef actually told us that he had received a delivery from Japan that day, but it wasn't a high enough quality (taste wise I assume) for him to serve. We begged him to serve it to us and he obliged. It was delicious. I could not figure out why he refused to serve it to customers other than his standards for quality must be exceptionally high. We liked the uni so much we ordered another four pieces.

The maki rolls were all very good as well. We ordered the negi hama, spicy tuna, kampayo, white tuna jalapeno, and spicy unagi. Again, the portions were extremely generous. Usually I expect to see a nice balance between rice and fish, but here it was almost 80% fish, 20% rice. The ratio was absurd. Everything was outstanding. In particular I liked the negi hama, which of course reminded me of the lovely carpaccio we had earlier, but made even better with rice and nori. I was intrigued by the spicy unagi, which I found to be very fresh and an interesting departure from the typical sweet sauce that accompanies unagi.

Overall we were very impressed by Seadog. Excellent quality sushi, great preparation, and the chef seemed like a very nice guy. Although the location isn't the greatest (Noble Square), the value, generous portions, and BYO feature make it a step above competing sushi restaurants in the area (Usagi Ya, Kyu, Blue Fin, Coast, etc.)