On Wednesday night, 10 active members of the Stockholm blogging community got together for sushi and conversation. While I had never met another Stockholm blogger, I had met Stockholm sushi before, and if it wasn’t competent but unadventurous, it had been downright awfulAs the review says, East’s sushi is “famous”. They inserted rock-hard gherkins into my rolls. It was like chewing icecubes. And their waiters were definitely there to starfuck, not do something as banal as some actual waitering.. So it was with trepidation that I entered Raw Sushi & Grill, a restaurant so new that the only mention of it on Google is the announcement for the dinner that was about to take place.

I ventured over to a spacious sunken table in the back half of restaurant and in my best Swedish, asked, “are you bloggers?” Introductions were made, and for the next three hours my mind battled both aural and oral overload in the form of rapid-fire Swedish bloggabbing over my first really good Sushi since NYCI’m not trying to be a sushi snob, really, but I admit that on my second day in Sweden I was shocked to find a white guy making sushi at a local mall eatery. Is that reverse racism?. I ordered a la carte, and got regulation salmon and tuna nigiri, both to end that particular craving and to test the basics. The tuna arrived, deepest red, and it melted in my mouth, so I knew right then I’d be coming back.

There is a playfulness about the the food at Raw Sushi & Grill. The dishes are visually impressive, and the accompanying sauces often serve as ink for Japanese calligraphic flourishes. The Wasabi parfait was a shimmering pyramid of off-white speckled with green, with a flavor a pinch short of being overwhelming — It was passed around the table as curiosity got the better of most people. The service was both friendly and professional, but unlike similarly priced restaurants in NYC, we had what amounted to a private dining room all to ourselves for the duration of the nightFredrik took a picture that would feel perfectly at home in Time Out.
 
Update 9/21/03: Jonas posted the blognapkin.. This place deserves to be discovered.

But what about the bloggers? I remember being uppity with Felix and Matthew in February as they headed to a Gawker party in NYC. My position then, as a blogging purist, was that the whole point of blogging was negated if it becomes just another means to a socializing end. I now formally retract that position. Or rather, so what if that’s what blogging leads to? I’ve turned friends into readers; blogfests can turn readers into friends.

Yes, yesterday I discovered other bloggers can be delightful people, and among them you will find a much higher proportion of opinionated expressive people willing to knock about ideas. In Sweden, especially, this is a pleasant surpise. So I had a blast with Erik, Anna, Jonas, Jenny, Steffanie, David, Fredrik, Susan and Malin, all of whom sat unflinchingly through some highly dubious Swedish grammatical constructions on my part. Liksom den här?