The Bottom Line
Pros
- Excellent sauces and fresh ingredients
- Large variety
- Beautiful if incongruous location
- Sushi is reasonably priced
Cons
- Location hard to find
Description
- Fine-dining Japanese
- Elegant, historical manor location
- Distinctive sushi
- While the wait staff welcome children, the quiet nature of the fine-dining restaurant would keep parents on edge
Guide Review - Review: Shiro Restaurant in Novi
Atmosphere
Although an incongruous location for a fine-dining Japanese restaurant, the 1929 mansion makes for a memorable dining experience. This is not lost on the restaurant’s owners who named it “Shiro,” a word that means “white castle” in Japanese.
The three-story, white mansion harkens back to the antebellum period. It has four white columns adorning the front porch, gabled attic windows and French doorways throughout. The main entrance leads into the manor’s foyer, complete with a grand staircase. The restaurant’s dining rooms are located throughout the house and include private dining rooms and a Japanese tatami room with karaoke.
Food
In addition to its wide-selection and creative combinations of sushi, Shiro offers traditional appetizers and entrees, including salads, noodle bowls, tempera, teriyaki meals, bento boxes and hibachi. Shiro’s dinner menu also includes Filet Mignon and Rack of Lamb -- leftovers from when the restaurant first opened with French-Japanese cuisine. While the restaurant utilizes fresh, quality ingredients, its sauces provide the signature element to manyh of its dishes. Everything from the sushi to the shumai is served with its own unique dipping sauce. Each type and variety of sauce is delicious, complementing the food like a fine wine.
The Wasabi Shumai is a wasabi-imbued steam dumpling. It was appropriately spicy and served with a plum-like sauce. The California Roll was extremely fresh, especially the shrimp. Its sauce, a slightly spicy mayonnaise mixture, was so good that it was gone before the sushi.
In addition to the food, the restaurant has extensive wine and saki lists that offer several varieties by the glass or bottle.
Service
While as attentive and unobtrusive as you’d expect from a fine-dining establishment, the wait staff also manages to be modest and friendly.
