Sushi rolls into Broad Street

Home City News Sushi rolls into Broad Street

Broad Street Downtown Market and Tavern is refining its menu, and the most notable change is the addition of sushi, thanks to Broad Street’s new sushi chef, Ezra Bertakis.

“I’ve written a menu that will appeal to all sushi lovers from the basic to the fancy and extravagant, we want to be able to appeal to everyone, and we’re really keeping a high standard that way we only use the best first,” Bertakis said.

Executive Chef Brian Wilson is currently working on an upscale comfort food menu, which includes stuffed meatloaf, wedge salad, and a tuna sandwich.

“I think we thought this place was better than it was, better than it used to be,” Executive Chef Brian Wilson said. “We had a lot of craft beers, a lot of really nice wines, but the menu didn’t really match our atmosphere. So we wanted to match the food to the atmosphere and to the area.”

Broad Street tries to source as much food locally as it can, with an emphasis on always using fresh fruits and vegetables.

“We tried to shorten our menu to things that we could do right and homemade,” Wilson said.  “Everything here is homemade. I do all my vegetables fresh. I do most of them oven roasted. Today, I have a tri-colored organic carrot that is oven-roasted. It has 35 percent more sugars in it than a normal carrot, so when you roast it you can really taste it. It’s more flavorful. We’ll have nicer specials that people can get into. I know that this is meat and potatoes area, so we do meat and potatoes, but we also wanted to do sushi because there’s no place out here for sushi.”

Ezra Bertakis grew up in the Hillsdale area and trained under Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto after working in hotel restaurants in South Florida. After working with Morimoto’s executive chef from Philadelphia, Bertakis was invited to learn sushi from Morimoto himself. Morimoto, an Iron Chef star, is acclaimed for his integration of Western and Japanese ingredients.

“Morimoto came into town all the time and it was a very rigorous program and I worked from the bottom all the way up with them,” Bertakis said. “I got to go to the South Beach food and wine festivals and to New York to the restaurant there here the Food Network studios. And that really took it to the next level with my own types of restaurants throughout Detroit and Birmingham.”

Bertakis said he came back to the Hillsdale area to put this training to work at Broad Street Tavern.

“We’re really trying to appeal to the local public,” Bertakis. “We try to locally source from Great Lakes Seafood and other places like that. We have an opportunity in this town to make something really awesome.”

For many students, the presence of sushi in Hillsdale is an exciting addition to the Hillsdale food-scene.

“In my year off I spent some time in Australia and I’ll never forget the sushi I had there,” sophomore Andrew Kern said. “It always takes me back to some of the best times of my life. I seriously cannot wait for this to get going, so I can go there every time I get paid and blow all of my spending money.”

Between sushi and the comfort foods, there’s something to appeal to all customers, according to the two chefs.

“I think we really hit it out of the park on that one,” Wilson said. “If you go to Jackson, you’re going to get sushi, and that’s it. Here you can come in, you can bring in a large party and you have something for everyone without dulling down the quality of our sushi and we’re not dulling down the quality of our comfort foods. You’re going to get quality no matter what you order here.”

The quality of food and the length of preparation means Broad Street is hiring more wait staff and kitchen staff to keep up a quick pace for customers.

“My food in the back takes longer to prepare, but we’re going to get it out in a shorter time. That’s just a lot of training, a lot of pre-prep, making sure things are set up and ready to go, that was drilled into my head in college, that’s just always have your set up ready. So if your setup is ready, you can get the food out quickly.”

Both Wilson and Bertakis emphasized the importance of quality in all of their food choices.

“We aim for the best, so the highest standards across the board,” Bertakis said. “We do a lot of pairings with all of our micro-brewed beers that we have on stock and all of our wines across the board. The availability as far as that goes is just incredible.”