It’s good to find something in a trendy area that’s not overhyped and so unique. No Wabi Sabi is not a salon, it’s a smallish restaurant on the often skanky Smith St. But Wabi is all the good things about Smith St and none of the freaky and scary. One thing that shines through is it’s a real Japanese restaurant in a warm, convivial atnosphere that’s perfect for an intimate night or to take your friends for after work drinks. Even the waitresses are cute!
This place quite simply just rocks. For about $18, you get a 3 dish main course. Their sashimi is fresh and top notch. Servings are generous and just plain hard to fault. For two of us, we spent approx $65 (no alcohol purchased) and had a far better experience than Taxi at some four times that! The only thing you could fault is they could perhaps have a better wine list, but the sake list was reasonably compreshensive.
If only there were more places like this. 5 out of 5.
What can you say about the inimitable Steven Wright. The guy put in a stellar performance.
His support act Akmal Saleh desperately needs some new material. We saw his show the week before and he basically regurgitated the whole thing and not in a ‘it’s funny a second time!’ way but in a cringe with disgust as his jokes get more and more irrelevant with repeat performance.
Back to the main man. He was on stage for what felt like two hours. You could tell when he started ad libbed by a change in story telling tempo, but for the most part he was ‘the man’, pulling out king one liners like ‘the earth is bipolar’ and ‘I am going to get an MRI done to see if I am claustrophobic’ in his own dead pan way. He picked up the guitar to keep it interesting every now and them.
There was elements of Hunter S Thompson in the performance as he prattles on about ‘fear and loathing in . . .’ style gags. One such example taking LSD in a softball match: a plane crashes on the field and he’s trying to catch it in his mitt!
This gig was about $68 a ticket but everything was top notch. One’s things for certain who would’ve known anyone with a Masters in psychology, and a penchant for drug induced lateral thinking could be so funny. Like most of his skit subjects, he had me in tears!