Plainview: Fish sleuthing at Kumo

Middling lunch at Kumo today. The vaunted “eggplant sandwich,” an elaborate-but-[previously] harmonious construction of fried eggplant, spicy lobster and tuna and raw salmon, was so wan as to make us wonder whether we got the wrong order. (The waitress assured us we hadn’t.)

I was intrigued by the “Carly salad” (lettuce, avocado, tuna, seaweed salad and crunch) but what showed up was the same desultory greens deployed in the house salad, topped indiscriminately with a blob of seaweed, pieces of tuna and slices of avocado, all stuck together with way too much panko crumbs.

My sashimi platter was populated with bland, overchilled fish, including three slices of a spongy white fish that the waitress told me was “white tuna.” When I asked the sushi chef for more information, he told me it was albacore tuna. This didn’t seem right to me as albacore tuna has a definite pink cast and this fish was stark white.

Back at the office I called my fish guru, Artie Hoernig of Artie’s South Shore Fish and Grill, a restaurant and fish market in one. He confirmed that albacore tuna is pale pink and told me that what’s billed as white tuna is often either escolar or Chilean sea bass. The former, he said, has a distinctly oily texture (which this fish did not); the latter often comes frozen which, he said, could explain the spongy texture.

Kumo Sushi is at 18 Manetto Hill Mall, Plainview, 516-681-8881.