Fish One, Arlington Heights: Beautiful but slow

After watching the sophomore football game at nearby JHHS, we went for dinner at Fish One.
1309 N Rand Rd (Just south of the Target at Thomas/Willow)
Prospect Heights, IL 60070
(847) 590-9722

The first impression is darkness: it's very subtly lit, with tea lights on the tables and few recessed lights in the ceiling. The sushi bar is well lit, but everywhere else is kind of umbral. And that's a shame because the food is gorgeous.

Our appetizer of stuffed mushrooms came on a bed of greens, and striped with two sauces, one dark salty-sweet, and one caramel-colored and spicy. The shrooms were stuffed with crab (not spelled with a k), and had a lot of flavor, even without the sauces which we scraped up with the greens.

Miso soup was above average but nothing specifically great about it.

And then dinner sort of ground to a halt, with nothing showing up for about 15-20 minutes. The waitress came back and took our order again, it had been lost.

Salads finally came out about another five minutes later, on a pretty green triangular plate. Topping the salad was a big spun nest of some red excelsior -- almost no flavor, it's probably a dyed daikon. The dressing is a typical Japanese cafe mayo/ginger sort of thing, but very good.

We split a tempura maki (MrsF is making slow inroads at sushi, but raw fish will probably never happen for her), which had a nice heat/cold, soft/crunch balance.

She had a 7-spice filet, which was mis-heard as medium well instead of medium rare (but still juicy and tender so she didn't send it back -- we were quite hungry at this time). It was accompanied by rice and mixed veggies.

The menu includes quite a variety of interesting rolls (e.g. Yin Yang with black rice and white tuna, white rice with unagi) but I wanted to just have a bunch of fish and rice, so I had the tekka-don, which had three varieties of tuna (I forget what they were labeled at except for the "ultra-white"), over a mound of rice, with two little piles of greens and various oshinko. Very generous portions at $18, and again, beautiful to look at with a fan of pear slices and a tea lamp encircled with sheets of what was probably the same red stuff that was in my salad.

It took a while again to get our check taken care of. We were told our waitress was new, and they looked under-staffed, although not especially crowded, with only two women on the floor, one at the bar, and two sushi chefs.

To sum up, they do a great job with presentation, and the quality is excellent, but they seem to have some service problems. Perhaps a bad night? Give them a a chance. It's not Katsu or Heat, but you can get good fish here.