The Chili Roll comes topped with krab under a spicy, Japanese seven-spice mayo.
Matthew Schniper
If you’ve been reading the Indy’s food section with weekly consistency the last couple months, you may have noticed a decent amount of coverage around the Peyton area, specifically at The Shops at Meridian Ranch. That’s the small strip mall just outside Antler Creek Golf Course, off Stapleton Drive, roughly a 30-minute drive from Downtown Colorado Springs. Thanks to older, relatively recent and new openings, The Shops now hosts almost a dozen food-and-drink options, almost all independent, from a brewery to a diner, sports bar and burrito spots. On a not-long-ago visit, I realized we had some catching up to do, which included trying the culinary cluster’s fusion Japanese spot.
Ban Sushi opened in late December 2020, operated by Chang Oh, who between 2004 and 2015 owned the Powers Boulevard AI Sushi & Grill location, he tells me. Oh originally came to the U.S. from South Korea in the late 1980s and he counts about 50 years’ combined sushi experience between him and a couple of his kitchen team members. Other staff, including my server, followed him here from AI after the five-year hiatus, during which he says he invested in another Japanese restaurant in Oregon. When I ask him about why he’s reopened here after the long break, he says he saw the potential in having Japanese food exclusivity in the area, away from the plethora of Springs spots.
In addition to sushi, Oh’s menu offers noodles (udon and yakisoba), bento boxes, teriyaki, a few Korean items like bulgogi, and a list of standard appetizers like tempura and gyoza. He’s also got a beer and wine license plus a couple ice cream desserts. Expect around 30 specialty sushi rolls, another 20 maki (cheaper by about half) plus the usual nigiri and sashimi seafood options, all commonly priced. There’s probably nothing you haven’t seen before here, but from my limited sampling, presentations are beautiful, freshness is on-point and I don’t find anything out of place with respect to overall quality. I stuff myself at lunch on-site and bring one entrée home that nearly feeds two at dinner for around $75 all-in — I’m happy.
While dining in, I sip green tea at a sun-drenched table at the window, thankfully framed in by a partition wall of glass so I don’t get cold-blasted each time the door opens on the other side at the entryway. The decor’s stark and minimalist, modern with black and gray tones offset by light wood chairs. Everything’s bright and clean and I enjoy a simple bowl of complimentary miso broth and a crunchy, palate-prepping cabbage and lettuce salad with carrot shavings and a creamy sesame dressing. I order a couple nigiri, priced in pairs for around $5: salmon (one of my sushi have-to-have’s) and sea eel (anago, not the more-familiar-to-most unagi, which is freshwater eel). The salmon has that rich, start-to-melt (butter invoking) texture and pure, well … salmon flavor; few food flavors are as satisfying in their pure form, distracted by nothing else than vinegar rice (or no rice at all if sashimi). The anago by contrast gets dolled up with a drizzle of eel sauce and a thin nori wrap for a salty-sweet delight textured more like fish skin and flaky, unctuous meat.
Next I nab two rolls: the Buddha and the Chili Roll. The first, a vegan maki roll, wraps an impressively thin strip of fried tofu around green bean and Japanese squash; it’s mild with a tinge of starchy sweetness and a finishing snap between the teeth from the string greens. The Chili Roll features spicy salmon solely at its core and all the flavor complexity on its topping: shredded wheat-like strips of layered surimi (imitation krab) topped with spicy mayo made with shichimi (the potent Japanese seven-spice made in part with sesame seeds, peppercorns and red chiles), dollops of a deep crimson red chile sauce and a dusting of shichimi seasoning. For all that it doesn’t smolder past a medium spiciness as a rounded creaminess from the proteins balances out each bite.
The chirashi plate is omakase-style, meaning chef’s choice of sashimi pieces.
Matthew Schniper
I learn that only the dinner menu’s served during weekend lunch hours versus the near-mirror lunch menu printed on back of the same flip menu. So prices jump a few dollars, but proportions expand as well. (At some places you always wonder.) So, in my example, the chirashi plate that’s $20 at lunch with a dozen sashimi pieces becomes 15 pieces for $28 at dinner. The fish selections are omakase style, i.e., chef’s choice unless requested otherwise for taste or allergies.
Especially at places that do Asian fusion, it’s important to ask whether you’re getting a Japanese or Korean chirashi setup, as the latter’s affiliated with a side of tart gojuchang (Korean red chile) sauce to pour over all the raw fish selections and assorted veggies. I love it that way, but I’m just as pleased with this more stark plating of the seafood items circled around a puck of sushi rice that’s topped in grated daikon threads with additional garnishes of biting radish sprouts, fishy seaweed salad, a lemon wheel, faintly sweet vinegar cucumbers, ginger, pickled squash relish, wasabi and perilla leaves (called sesame leaves; basically a cousin to shiso leaves with a similar astringent, citrus taste). Oh has decided to give me various portions of shrimp, salmon, tuna, krab, tamago (compressed beaten egg), amberjack, white tuna and fatty tuna. Some I eat plain, like the super white and fatty tuna, and others I dip in a touch of soy or eat with one of the garnishes or a dab of the sinus-burning, green horseradish paste. It’s somewhat of a choose-your-own-adventure and an overall filling but light meal sans all the sauces and fixins of specialty rolls. Pick it when you’re in the mood for something plain and pretty, not complicated, like when you’re stressed or burnt-out from a workweek and something simpler somehow feels like the right path toward decompressing and appreciating singular flavors as a mindful meal meditation.