Mumon Restaurant Review

Mumon Japanese Restaurant is an upscale dining establishment in an upscale neighborhood, Garden City. The menus features traditional Japanese fare with a modern twist. Open seven days a week, Mumon offers a wide variety of cold and hot appetizers, salads, noodles, sushi and sashimi, seafood, meat and poultry and a few vegetarian entrees.

Mumon Japanese Restaurant brings a sophisticated, New York City-type vibe to Long Island. Opened in January 2009, the Japanese-inspired design features bright reds alongside dark wood tones. Polished tables and brown leather-lined banquettes set a sophisticated tone for the restaurant. If you like privacy, call to reserve a banquette by the windows, where you and your party will be separated from adjoining diners by Japanese-designed partitions. There's also a bar with a white counter with Japanese maple leaf decorations and bar stools with wicker seats.

Some of Mumon's most popular appetizers are the Yellow Tail Ceviche, served with a citrus vinaigrette and salsa cruda, and the Kobe beef carpaccio. Excellent salads include the house-made duck prosciutto salad and the seafood salad, which comes with a mix of octopus, fluke, salmon skin and shrimp combined with a sweet vinaigrette.

My husband enjoyed a unique appetizer: the Japanese lobster risotto, which included a creamy lobster sauce topped with sauteed lobster on a bed of cripsy somen noodles. For a main course, he savored the roasted duck breast, which he said was "just ducky" --- well-prepared and succulent.

I started with the beautifully-presented Assorted Seaweed Salad. Americans are sometimes taken aback by the idea of eating vegetables from the sea, but trust me, they taste at least as good as those grown on land. For my main course, I chose several of the freshly prepared nori rolls, accompanied by a delicious ginger miso sauce.

I tasted a surprisingly luscious dessert: the green tea flan, topped with red beans and a creamy custard sauce. My husband ordered the delicately flavored strawberry sorbet to finish his meal.

Mumon offers a number of innovative cocktails including its Haiku Jasmine Green Tea Saketini, made from Gekkeikan Haiku Sake and jasmine green tea.