When I say sake, you say bomb.

Few cuisines demand the pairing of food and alcohol together. Pizza and beer is the only one that immediately jumps to mind, but sushi and sake bombs has to be on the list somewhere, especially when sitting right at the sushi bar.

When you belly up to the sushi bar and take a seat, an unspoken agreement is made between you and the sushi gods – sake bomb be thy name.

You are not just agreeing to participate in sake bomb consumption with your own dining companions, but also your neighboring sushi bar adventurers to your right and left and, of course, the sushi chefs. If you can’t hang with that, grab a table in the dining room.

Kansai Sushi and Ramen House is wedged between a Starbucks and a Wingstop right off Highway 50 on 65th Street. It’s not quite a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place, but definitely start looking for parking before you pass the restaurant.

The restaurant is small, but the space is used efficiently. There were a handful of four-top and two-top tables on the left side, and a two-station sushi bar with about ten seats on the right side. Bonus points for being completely neat and clean; this place looks spotless. We grabbed a few seats at the sushi bar.

My go-to dish is usually albacore pepperfin. It’s a simple dish that’s fairly difficult to mess up as long as the fish is fresh and cut properly. Our sushi chef, Adam, didn’t disappoint.

The fish came out cleanly sliced in perfect little quarter-inch thick filets, topped with a sauce of sesame oil and ponzu. Often times, sushi chefs get lazy and garnish an otherwise perfect dish with thick round cuts of a jalapeño pepper, but Chef Adam presented us with nice, thin jalapeño slices that happened to have the perfect level of heat. Good job chef, you earned yourself a bomb.

Next, we tasked Chef Adam with making a roll of his choice. He made us a photogenic looking roll with shrimp tempura, spicy tuna and cucumber on the inside and topped with seared tuna, avocado and unagi. He squirted a healthy, but neat, coat of the spicy pink mayonnaise sauce and the sweeter unagi sauce on the top, being careful not to drown.

Chef Adam is an artist. He finished it off with sprinkles of diced green onions and masago, the little orange fish eggs that pop in your mouth. He also appeared to drizzle a light layer of chili oil over his finished product, which ended up looking and tasting great. Sake bombs.

Another simple dish Chef Adam prepared for us was sea steak, which is seared red tuna. It is prepared much like pepperfin, but is seared on all sides and seret ved sliced over a bed of shredded daikon radish.

I thought the fish felt a little dry and tough; it was possibly seared too long. We asked for extra sauce for this one and tried to sponge up some juices by poking it with chopsticks and tenderizing it. This was the only miss of the night, but sake bombs for the effort.

Of course, we had to try the ramen since we were in a ramen house, so we ordered the kakuni ramen, which has the house broth and a generous portion of braised pork belly.

This has to be the best ramen in town, mainly because of how delicious the pork belly tastes, but also because of the complexity of its broth. Some broths are very watery and devoid of flavors, but this house broth tasted like it had been simmering in a stockpot for hours with its flavors commingling and taking their time to develop.

I wanted a lot of pork belly so I also ordered an appetizer portion on the side and threw it on top of my big steaming bowl of broth, which also came with lots of bamboo shoots, half an egg, and seaweed. Definitely try the appetizer pork belly, even if you don’t order the whole bowl of ramen – it is glazed with a sweet sauce and tastes amazing. Somebody in the back deserved a sake bomb for this one.

Steven Senn can be reached at [email protected]