Tel.: 369-3659
 What is it about baseball caps and N.D.G.? I counted more homeless-looking men in baseball caps (backwards and forwards) in Mikado Monkland tonight than I’ve seen in a week sitting in front of the Faubourg. Thank god these guys didn’t bring their mangy dogs.
Must be some reverse-yuppie cultural thing. “Let’s look as slovenly as we can so no one will notice our BMW SUV out front.”
At any rate, that was the tone at Mikado, formerly Zyng, formerly Matteo, on a humid summer Saturday night. Bizarro-world yuppies chowing down on upscale faux-Japanese food in a red brick tunnel.
The original Mikado, on St. Denis — oh wait, or is it Laurier? Doesn’t matter, since the parties involved are feuding; let’s just say Laurier — is loud, obnoxious, small and expensive (kind of like Richard Dreyfuss) and it seems the genetics have at least partly osmosed down here to N.D.G.
One thing that set the evening apart was the company of a stellar food critic as well as an analytical gourmand; there was no shortage of happy food talk at the table. I remained mainly mute, observing the strange crowd that ebbed and flowed through the narrow aisle like spawning salmon.
 There’s a takeout counter towards the back, and it was in heavy demand throughout the evening. A vaguely unsettling sight was watching botoxed women in sweats and the aforementioned sports aficionados strutting through the room hefting their brown paper takeout bags. Couldn’t there be a separate takeout entrance out back — or better yet, a drive-thru?
Still, there are things to like here. The gyoza are crisply satisfying and the pork harumaki mysteriously spicy, and the almost-raw beef tataki is succulent. None is anyone without their sauce, and the three accompanying ones are also different, which is rare in Asian restaurants these days, all sauces seeming to have sprung from a single stock.
The yakitori is steamed, so that’s a minor minus, but the sauce, again, is pretty good.
The sushi, ordered a la carte from one of those ubiquitous “multiple choice” pencil menus, is tired-looking, the tuna slightly greying, but a tobiko (flying-fish roe) roll is genki, the tiny critters exploding onto the tongue like nano-pop-rocks. One has a raw quail egg atop; the analytical gourmand downs it while invoking Sam and Ella.
 By the time we have settled in, we are shouting, because that’s what one does at Mikado, any Mikado, after 8 p.m. The narrow, red-brick room throws the sound around like a wind tunnel and the boisterous yups react by getting louder. There are people furtively peeking in at the front door by now, but they seem to know better when they see the jam-packed room and are never seen again.
The mains are mainly plain. A thinly-disguised brandade de morue tastes a lot like a wedge of butter. The steak teriyaki, arriving dramatically on a sizzling cast-iron platter, is medium rare but lacking any beefiness, as if it had been somehow removed with a syringe. The shrimp tempura is generous and passably non-greasy. There is nothing here that makes any noise to compete with the assault on our ears. It is simply . . . acceptable.
The service is good. The server does not hover but surreptitiously makes sure that our glasses are always full, and is never far away if we need something — but then again, being more than ten feet from any of the tables in this small space is a hard thing to do.
 A palette of sherbets, lychee, mango, raspberry and a couple more, is pleasingly tart, and a very good coffee, served in individual Vietnamese-style steeping containers, is a great end to the evening. The dinner is picked up by the lovely critic: around $250 for our evening’s Japanalia.
It wasn’t a disaster, but I would have to say that despite all the baseball caps, Mikado Monkland ties in the ninth inning with none of the bases loaded.
—Reviewed by Nicholas Robinson
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