Sushikazu

Maybe your honey named a star after you and registered it with the U.S. Patent Office for a small fee.

Or perhaps you hang with a crowd so important that their faces are painted on the wall above their table at the Palm. (Though there are so many celebrity faces in that bustling Broad Street steak house - the caricatures are a gimmick the chain uses in every city - that I've begun to wonder who isn't on the wall at the Palm. OK, I do know someone - me.)

So I couldn't help thinking that personalization has become a lot less special than it used to be. Then I went to Sushikazu. In this tiny Japanese bungalow behind a strip mall in Blue Bell, I discovered the last bastion of pure naming glory: the sushi roll.

The menu seems typical enough at Bruce Kim's charming three-year-old restaurant, with standard rolls ranging from the California (imitation crab, avocado) to the Spider (deep-fried soft-shell crab). But sit at the sushi bar long enough and you'll hear regular after regular rattle off names that are privy only to Kim and his special clientele.

"I'll have a Perez roll," bellows one woman, entertaining a new colleague. She turns to me and confides, with a wink, "That's me!"

The affable Kim also has insider rolls dubbed the Ms. Wendy, the Bryne and the Linda. The Konica roll (tempura shrimp and king crab) is named for a good customer who is a photographer. Another concoction, with kumamoto oysters and sea urchin, is called the Midnight Special, in honor of three women who ate it and subsequently became pregnant.

All this would sound like just another marketing scheme if it weren't for two things. First, Kim's rapport with customers who sit at the counter of his sushi bar reflects genuine warmth and familiarity. And his sushi is really, really good, built on fine ingredients, superb technique, and some of the most creative combinations west of Center City.

One bite of the spicy tuna special and my eyes lit up. It arrived on a ball of rice filled with crunchy bits of fried tempura batter. Then I savored the unfolding layers of flavor: a ruby slice of pristine tuna, then the subtle heat of minced tuna tossed in spicy mayonnaise, and finally the pop of tiny tobiko (flying fish eggs).

The Area 51 brought a study of more subtle flavors: alabaster-white yellowtail that was wrapped around creamy avocado and a snappy spine of asparagus and ringed with limey soy ponzu sauce and sliced kiwifruit. Microscopically thin jalape?o rounds were set above each piece of fish like hovering alien craft. Every ingredient - especially the tart-sweet kiwi, which Kim has decided is the perfect fruit for sushi - sang clearly in this composition, yet blended perfectly.

Kim likes kiwi so much, in fact, that he has painted much of his 57-seat restaurant a vibrant kiwi green. Several beautiful bonsai plants reinforce the decor's simple but verdant feel.

A sushi purist, of course, might look down on such creative maki rolls because they divert attention from the simple goodness of the ingredients. But Kim's combinations usually make sense, orchestrating flavors, textures and colors.

One over-the-top exception was the tuna tartare, which came festooned with so many bells and whistles - multicolored tobiko, jalape?o rounds, too-potent lime sauce, sprouts, and (of course) a wreath of kiwi - that it was impossible to taste the fish. And in some cases, Kim's portions were too big for diners to fully experience the one-bite architecture that is the hallmark of authentic sushi.

But great ingredients - from the sublimely sweet live scallop (properly cleansed in saltwater) to rich toro (tuna belly) and creamy California sea urchin - almost always compensated for any slips. And an amazingly tender slice of raw imported Japanese suzuki striped bass revealed a masterful cutting technique on a fish that I've elsewhere often found chewy.

Sushikazu also has an extensive menu of cooked foods, but they were less consistent and often more ordinary than the sushi. The grilled "trumpet" brought a spectacular presentation of a seashell stuffed with teriyaki-sauced conch that was unpleasantly chewy.

The steamed gyoza and sui mei dumplings - both made off-premises - were mushy and bland. And though I loved Sushikazu's teriyaki sauce - a dark, mysteriously spiced and mildly sweetened brew steeped no less than 12 hours - the strip steak it came with didn't come close in quality to Kim's fish. Stick with the teriyaki salmon.

That said, Kim's wife and kitchen chef, Sonmei "Sunny" Kim, has several other specialties more than worth a visit. The sweet, smoky white miso soup was perfectly nice, but I'm partial to the less common sea urchin soup. That clear broth was redolent of shiso, a Japanese leaf with a minty, woody flavor, and filled with orange lobes of sea urchin that float onto your spoon and melt on your tongue like puffs of sea cream.

Slices of superbly tender cooked octopus were irresistible slathered with a sweet miso nuta sauce. Kyo age, a fine variation on the traditional age dofu, brought cubes of browned bean curd in a pool of tangy, dark broth beneath shavings of smoked bonito fish.

But Sunny really scored with marvelous renditions of two oft-abused Japanese classics - tempura and sukiyaki.

Her tempura batter is so light and fried so crisp that it clings to tender green beans, sweet fans of eggplant and, especially, morsels of succulent lobster like a translucent veil. The tempura-fried shrimp that floats in a bowl of udon noodles not only enriches the soup, but soaks in the broth until it billows like a luxurious and savory gown.

Too often, sukiyaki tastes like a pot of vegetable, beef and noodle mush. At Sushikazu, it is elegant, a Japanese version of French pot-au-feu in which raw ingredients are meticulously arranged in a cast-iron pot and gently stewed in a lightly sweetened, soy-colored sake.

The result is a sublimely complex bouillon that marries the flavors - paper-thin slices of rib-eye steak, sweet onions rings, earthy mushrooms, and crunchy scallions - yet preserves the natural snap of each individual element.

Best of all, tangled at the bottom are threads of konnyaku, the rare yam-flour noodles known as "devil's tongue," which have a lively resilience.

The sukiyaki was so good that it became my second-favorite dish, after that spicy tuna/crunchy rice appetizer, which, come to think of it, I didn't know the name of.

When I asked Kim what it was called, he could only shrug. "Spicy tuna/crunchy rice appetizer?" he asked.

Hmm. Who needs a star registry with potential naming rights like that?