Photos by Amelia Goe
Location and Hours:4236 N. Central Ave.
Phoenix, AZ 85012
Monday-Thursday 11 a.m. – 10 p.m.
Friday-Saturday 6:30 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Sunday closed
Star Rating (0 – 4): ★★½
Recommended: Peking duck, seafood hot pot
One thing is apparent when it comes to The Clever Koi — it’s not some hole-in-the-wall restaurant that some of us locals are accustomed to when we dine out for Asian cuisine. However, as I exited the well-designed new digs, what I wondered was if I enjoyed it just as much.
The Clever Koi is clearly a beautiful restaurant inside and out. The feel-good vibes of the well-crafted aesthetic quickly infect patrons and the menu further excites customers. Each dish sounds better and better, and the various exciting ingredients that the average human normally does not eat on any given day certainly create high anticipation. Smoked “pig face,” octopus cake and kimchi are just a few items that you simply won’t find anywhere else in midtown Phoenix.
While I normally save my opinion of the dining experience outside of the cuisine for last, I’ll start this review off with it. There’s a few different experiences you can have here. One would be during the dinner hour when the bar is positively bustling, the tables are filled with friends catching up after work and an electric hum fills the air. Another would be during the lunch hour when you can take a seat outside on the patio that overlooks Central Avenue on one of the many beautiful days in the Valley of the Sun. Finally, you could come at an off hour when the place is all to yourself and your guest(s), the service is charming and you can escape the growing — although slowly — busyness of the city.
Now, I had been anxiously waiting for months to try The Clever Koi. I walked past the construction day after day hoping to see the “Now Open” sign. Needless to say, I had high hopes. Did anything knock me out of the park? Well, let’s talk about what came up to home plate, shall we?
The steamed buns are $4 each, but each dish only actually consists of one single bun. The Peking duck with house bacon, mizuna (a Japanese green) and charred plum jam was good. The bacon was thick and delicious but the steamed bun itself was not soft but quite frankly a little tough.
Dumplings come with four per plate at $8, and the smoked bok choy with marinated tofu and red pepper jelly didn’t impress me. I will say that the flavor combination of the bok choy and jelly was a surprisingly good pairing, but the dumpling itself does not come across as authentic.
The kimchi fried rice at $10.50 was decent but I’ve had better from my childhood Korean neighbor. The dish that I enjoyed the most thus far has been the $13.50 seafood hot pot with shrimp, scallops, catfish, octopus cake and a choice of either udon noodle or the gluten-free konyaku noodle. The spicy sauce is delicious and I would honestly put it on anything. The seafood was well cooked and as I’m unfamiliar with the konyaku noodle, my experience with it was that it had an unexpected chewiness and was hard to manage but not unpleasant.
While The Clever Koi has not won a spot on my list of top five favorite restaurants in downtown/midtown Phoenix, I of course am not throwing in the towel. The ingenuity of the menu is promising and inspiring. It seems to me this new restaurant is just working out the kinks. The Clever Koi is getting into the swing of things and the team of young, talented and risk-taking chefs and owners keep me optimistic that it will be making quite the splash in due time.
Contact the reporter at angoe@asu.edu
