Sei

444 7th St. NW.

Original review:
About a week ago I dined at Sei, a sushi restaurant recommended by both a former coworker and the Washingtonian, which listed Sei at #68 in its top 100 restaurants.

My experience was quite good. In fact, I am willing to proclaim Sei my favorite DC sushi restaurant. Sei has several unique and creative offerings in both their sushi and their drinks. The execution of these creations is also quite good. Meanwhile, the price is not exorbitant with most rolls close to if not at $10. My date and I had 5 rolls and we didn't finish them, so you should be able to satisfy your sushi craving for about $40 of rolls. The drinks are pricier and have a temptingly long list of expensive wines and cocktails. The cocktails are worth trying, even if many of them are heavy with cucumber.

The decor is nice, upscale, and dark. Sei is a larger restaurant, but breaks the spaces into subsections to create a smaller feel. The downside is the noise. We had a window seat and even though it was probably on the edge of the noise, it was still noisy and difficult to hear our server.

Anyway, the specific dishes I had were:
Triple Tuna Roll: not unique, but a very good rendition
S.O.S. Roll: very fruity with strawberry & oranges and such. Good, but hard to tell it was sushi.
Fish & Chips Roll: Very good.
Snow White Roll: Eel and roasted apple, very good.
Smokey Eel Nagati: good, but nothing special.

Between us we had two drinks, the Silver Samurai and the Liquid Wasabi. Both were quite good, with the Samurai a refreshing cucumber based drink that seemed more appropriate for summer and the Wasabi having a lovely kick. I'd recommend the Wasabi.

For more sushi places see my Sushi post

Update: I dined at Sei again recently and I again came away impressed. The Snow White and the Fish & Chips rolls were excellent again, as was the other roll we tried, but the name is escaping me at the moment. I believe it was a less original roll though. My drink, some kind of blueberry concoction, was very, very good.


Update: Yet another trip to Sei, and again a good time. The restaurant was practically empty around 6pm on a Saturday, but had filled up by the time we finished dining. I definitely enjoyed the lower noise levels and less burdened servers. The selections this time were:
Surf N. Turf Roll, Albacore Roll, Snow White Roll, and Fish & Chips Roll.
I had not had the Surf N. Turf and Albacore before, but both were quite good, especially the Surf N. Turf, which, if I remember right, was lobster and kobi beef. The drinks (Japanese Mojito and Zen Collins) were quite good as always at Sei.