Haru

It's easy to get psyched up over Haru if you crave sushi and high design. Some of the maki rolls actually shimmer with the luster of gold foil beneath the vaulted ceiling of this stylishly renovated old Old City bank.

But don't spend too much good green wasabi here just yet - anticipation and gilt artifice have rarely been so poorly served.

This is the seventh Haru in the Manhattan-based chainlet owned by Benihana Inc., and it's billed as a grand Japanese experience at "reasonable" prices, a chic compromise between the luxe of Morimoto and the value of your neighborhood sushi counter. But it's not exactly cheap (we averaged about $75 per person in all for three courses and drinks). And I've had better fish at the Kami Sushi Express take-out nook on Sansom Street. Yet, from first glance, Haru promises to be a major new player. The nearly $4 million project revived the long-vacant shell of the Borie Bros. Bank at the corner of Third and Chestnut.

The soaring cathedral ceiling and tall, arching windows create an incredible din. But the room has been tempered visually with a minimalist look of tan, ribbed-leather banquettes, a warm teak floor, and a glass wall tiered with votive candles that rises behind the central bar. It all segues nicely into a two-story black-glass annex near the back, where the zigzag sushi bar sits on the ground floor, and a chic second-floor lounge is fringed with a beaded metal curtain and adorned with a working fireplace and cushy banquettes.

Haru may be Benihana's sophisticated child, but it is still hardwired like every other corporate chain, calculated to purvey a storehouse of proven cliches to the lowest common denominator. And clumsily at that.

I knew we were in trouble when we arrived for our first meal to a half-empty restaurant with a reservation for five diners, only to be offered a puny table with an extra chair stuck on the end.

We were moved to a larger table, but the service didn't improve. Drinks and dishes were continually rushed away before people were finished. A bamboo carafe of "chilled" sake was served lukewarm. When we asked for the chilled version, it quickly returned with the watery traces of a trip through the cocktail shaker - not what you want for $28 a carafe.

The menu did little to improve my mood.

Much of the cooked food comes in the two basic varieties typically found in mall food courts: deep-fried or lathered with teriyaki. Neither was impressive. The tempura batter was thick and rarely seemed fresh from the fryer, whether cloaking a pile of rock shrimp in spicy mayo or encasing the soft-shell crab (cool to the touch) inside the spider roll.

The teriyaki, meanwhile, was disappointingly thin and oversweetened, made with chicken stock instead of the beef bones that give better versions their complexity. Such a flimsy sauce couldn't do much for the skewers of unseasoned and overcooked meats that anchor the appetizer list - the scraps of Chilean sea bass "kushi" sold for $12, or the yakitori trio lowlighted by a gristly strip of beef billed as filet mignon.

An appetizer of miso-glazed black bass (a Nobu/Buddakan standard) was so undercooked it was sent back. When it reappeared 20 minutes later, it was bland, white and flabby, with none of the caramelized shine one expects from what the "corporate food adviser" told me over the phone should have been a two-day marination in miso and mirin.

There were a couple of acceptable appetizers - for example, the steamed edamame. The crab dumplings with chile vinegar sauce also were nice. The seared tuna tatake was amply portioned and of decent quality. The grilled garlic shrimp rubbed the throat with garlic overburn, but at least it had a punch.

Other starters were Westernized to dumb distraction, such as the lobster-miso soup that suffered the insult of butter - a jarringly non-Asian addition. Never mind the lack of lobster.

The cooked entrees were no more persuasive. The crispy duck triangles were fatty and oversweetened with hoisin. A lobster-shrimp "wasabi pepper" stir-fry was stunningly dull, and for $27 (the menu's priciest dish) was also miserly on crustacean and long on veggie filler.

Haru's sushi chefs seemed equally uninspired.

Ingredients sometimes were less than stellar, such as the $10 piece of usually luxurious o-toro tuna belly that had such a metallic fishiness and strange pale hue, I don't believe it was toro. Then again, the vaulted room was so numbingly loud, maybe I heard my server wrong. Or perhaps she was confused. Her colleague on my second visit insisted that the kitchen was featuring "kunomono" oysters - though such an oyster doesn't exist. (Kumamotois more likely.)

For the most part, though, the sushi here consistently displayed shabby knife-work, favoring long but skimpy slices that were too unwieldy to eat in a single bite, and far too sheer to highlight any textures.When the fish wasn't sliced poorly, there was too much rice, which easily overwhelmed something as delicate as sea urchin. When there was no rice, as with the usuzukuri fan of fluke, someone forgot to add the ponzu sauce that is essential to the dish. And when there was sauce, as with the yellowtail tartare, there was too much, a pungent one-dimensional bath of citrusy soy that washed away any chance to highlight potential subtleties in texture and flavor.

By the time I finally took a bite of the Manhattan roll, the gold-foil-topped tuna-and-mango maki that had so intrigued me, all I could taste was the fruit. Of disappointment.

Next Sunday, Craig LaBan reviews Carmine's Creole Cafe in Narberth. Contact restaurant critic Craig LaBan at 215-854-2682 or claban@phillynews.com