** Sapporo Japanese Steakhouse & Sushi
12905 Shelbyville Road
(502) 253-0036
For centuries, poor people and peasants in Japan have enjoyed teppanyaki, a simple form of outdoor cookery in which a metal sheet is suspended over a fire and used as a cooking griddle. During the lean years after World War II, this cooking method evolved into okonomiyaki shops, modest eateries with a narrow serving counter along a long grill, on which the chef would slap together crepe-like dishes stuffed with goodies - inexpensive and filling food that he could produce while showing off his skill with the kitchen knives.

Then in 1964, Japanese businessman Rocky Aoki opened a restaurant in New York City that took this kind of cookery to a new level. His food-as-theater concept, Benihana of Tokyo, introduced a whole generation of Americans to what we thought was Japanese cooking but was actually more of an international hybrid like chop suey or pizza pie. And Benihana in its turn was so successful that it spawned a nationwide chain (even a branch in Tokyo called, inscrutably, "Benihana of New York"); and Benihana begat a variety of imitators.

All of this is by way of noting that another Benihana-style eatery has come to Middletown in Louisville's far East End, a shopping-center storefront in a small strip mall in the huge empty parking lot that served the now-vacant Bigg's.

Sapporo Japanese Steakhouse & Sushi isn't just for teppanyaki, though - it offers diners a choice.

For those who want the slice-and-dice extravaganza, four teppanyaki grills, each seating about eight, are placed under huge smoke hoods in a separate room behind shoji screens in the back of the restaurant, behind a small bar that serves primarily as a waiting area. Dinner at the grills is priced according to your main ingredient and will range from $11.95 to $22.95. In another corner, the L-shaped sushi bar houses about 20 diners who can sit and interact directly with the sushi chefs, pointing at various items and watching as they are prepared. The main room holds another 20 tables where you can order from the menu and, if you wish, enjoy tableside preparation of fancy dishes like sukiyaki ($17.95) or shabu shabu ($22.95).

The room is simple, almost spare, in Japanese style, with beige walls and light oak, paper shoji screens and a couple of large potted plants. Tables are large and undraped, with simple wooden chairs, and the Japanese servers generally have excellent English and are happy to explain the menu.

It's easy enough to figure out, anyway, even if you're not accustomed to Japanese food; every item is listed by its Japanese name with a simple English explanation. It includes mostly popular Japanese dishes without anything particularly adventurous, but everything we tried - and we tried a lot - was consistently tasty and well-prepared.

Nearly two dozen appetizers ranger from $2.25 (for oshi tashi, cold boiled spinach with bonito fish shavings) to $7.50 for sashimi, a meal-starting array of sliced fresh raw fish. Edamame (soybeans in the pod, pop 'em and eat 'em like peanuts, a popular bar snack), are $3; gyoza (fried dumplings) are $3.50, and breaded-and-fried oysters ($3.50), scallops and shrimp ($4.50) are also available.

A good selection of more than two dozen entrees breaks out into noodle dishes (like batter-fried shrimp tempura on a bowl of udon noodles, $12.95); combination dinners (from $14.95 for sweet-soy-sauced chicken teriyaki and fried tempura to $19.95 for teriyaki, tempura and an order of sushi); "regular dinners" from as little as $8.50 (for tonkatsu, a breaded pork cutlet) to $19.95 (for lobster and steak); and sushi/sashimi combos from futomaki (giant sushi roll) to extravagant "love boats" for two, massive sushi and sashimi displays that range, depending on size, from $24.95 to $44.95. All entrees come with hot miso soup, a fresh salad with house dressing, and steamed or fried rice. You can also order sushi a la carte to go along with your meal.

We put together a sushi order of three maki sushi (rolls) - kappamaki (cucumber roll, $3), tekkamaki (tuna roll, $4) and California roll (avocado and "crab," $4.50), each sliced into six rounds; and pairs of nigiri sushi (fish bites on balls of rice) - saba (mackerel, $2.75) and ebi (cooked shrimp, $3). Everything was well prepared and the fish was firm and fresh - critical for raw-fish sushi items.

Sushi takes a while to prepare, and it helps to understand that: On a crowded night, your order and a lot of other people's, too, will be made by hand, and even with three artisans at work, it can take a while. Still, a wait of at least a half-hour on a crowded Friday night was long enough to make us sit up and take notice, and long enough to prompt the manager to stop by and apologize. Then, when our sushi order finally came, it arrived almost simultaneously with the soup and the salad, which made for a bit of frenzied eating after a long period with nothing to occupy us but beer, water and conversation.

The dinner salad was simple but quite good, crisp and cold; fresh iceberg lettuce and a bit of shredded carrot and red cabbage with a standard Japanese dressing with ginger and orange. The miso soup was salty and hot, a thick bonito-laced broth with a few bits of tofu and seaweed leaves.

Japanese fare doesn't really call for Western table wines, and Sapporo's wine list is appropriately short, mostly mass-market stuff in an appropriately low price range from $10 to $20. The also offer a limited selection of sake (from $3.50 to $19.95) and plum wine.

After starting with a Sapporo beer in a big aluminum can the shape of a mortar shell, I switched to sake with my main course, choosing not the traditional warmed variety but an ice-cold Sho Chiku Bai ($9.95 for a 300 ml bottle with a plastic screw cap), which seemed more appealing on a hot summer evening. Labeled "Premium Ginjo Sake," it turned out to be a U.S.-made product from a firm called Takara Sake USA in Berkeley, Calif. Clear as water, it smelled like cold steamed rice and had a crisp, fresh flavor that reminded me a bit of a dry white wine and went well enough with the Japanese fare.

An appetizer order of shrimp and vegetable tempura ($4.50) featured eight big pieces of tempura, crisply breaded with egg and crusty panko (rice flour). Two very large shrimp and oversize pieces of broccoli, eggplant, onion ring, mushroom, zucchini, sweet potato, and a slice of green pepper were sizzling hot and grease-free.

My wife's main course, flame-broiled saba (mackerel, $9.95) was a beautiful piece of fish, cut across the skin side with a diamond slash pattern and broiled dark brown. It was served with roasted vegetables cooked just tender (roll-cut carrots, potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli), with a garnish of curly endive and an orange slice.

I chose a daily special, a bento box ($19.95). I remembered this custom with delight from a trip to Japan years ago: Every train station has food vendors selling these takeaway lunches, a box with multiple compartments, each containing an interesting tidbit, the whole making a beautiful, edible display of food-as-art.

This one was much more hearty than the delicate bentos I enjoyed in Japan, though. Another huge mound of tempura was piled in one compartment of an oversize lacquer box, surrounced by a trio of gyoza (fried dumplings), a chicken breast teriyaki-style, and two big pieces of salmon teriyaki, swimming in almost too much of a sticky, sweet soy-based sauce, with a pile of roasted vegetables and on oversize scoop of hot steamed rice.

Just about the time I started making inroads into this ration, along the server came with the rest of the course: a semicircular dish containing perfect sashimi: two pieces of bright orange raw salmon and three medallions of dark-purple raw tuna, arranged on a haystack of shredded daikon radish with hot green wasabe horseradish and pickled ginger.

We really ate more than we should have - I would never have asked for a tempura appetizer if I had known a pile of tempura was coming on the bento - and it was probably excessive of us to order a la carte sushi and appetizers.

But hey, it was all delicious, and we still kept the total down to $76.63 plus a $12.37 tip. It would be easy to enjoy a filling dinner here for a whole lot less. $$$