Bergen Blossoms (and New Sushi Place)

 

3/24/25 AA Sushi and Bergen Place, Ballard neighborhood

An appointment brought me to Ballard around lunch time, so I took the opportunity to try a new sushi place in town. AA Sushi (remember all the companies that used to be called AAMCO and AACME so they would be listed first in the phone book? I guess it’s still a thing), which apparently started with a restaurant in Kirkland, just opened a new one in Ballard a few months ago. (It happens to be right next door to Ballard Consignment, where I stopped in to say hi to Greg’s jukebox, still there, unsold. Yay!)

I daresay these are cherries!

Whenever I try a sushi restaurant that’s new to me, I usually order chirashi as a test. But I had been craving saba (mackerel) lately, so I got a couple of saba nigiri with a salmon bowl (always a safe choice). Both were excellent, and the whole meal was a really good value (which is becoming less and less the case when dining out lately). Recommend!

Across the street from AA was Bergen Place, a pocket park well-decorated with several tall, tree-like sculptures and one actual tree just beginning to blossom. The pale pink petals had the telltale notches! Could it be that Sakura season is finally beginning? And I sketched outdoors without gloves for the first time since last fall! Hallelujah, perhaps it’s spring, after all!

Technical note: Look at all the sushi colors I got to show up on this aggressively pink Uglybook – with colored pencils! I’ve mentioned it before, but the trick is to put down white before applying color. Posca paint markers can be too thick and plastic-y, which makes colored pencil difficult to apply over it. I usually use a white colored pencil (the rainbow in this post), but it’s often not quite opaque enough. This time I used a white Penrote acrylic marker, which is ideal for this trick. The paint is thinner and less opaque than Posca, but it covers enough of the paper to enable colored pencils to show up brightly.

Penrote acrylic markers from Taiwan

I’d like to review Penrote markers, which I have been enjoying, but they were a gift from Taiwan, and I can’t find them anywhere online. I thought it would be frustrating to tell you how much I like them when I know you won’t be able to get them easily. (Its paint is very similar to the white Omiowl acrylic marker I discovered last year, fell in love with, and then discovered its fatal flaw.) The set I received has some nice pastel colors that I’ve been using here and there (the turquoise in these sketches and the pink at Wallingford Center). The white, though, continues to be the most useful, and if I could buy a bulk package of white only, I would.