A Great Escape

Godaiko’s soothing décor and pleasing Japanese cuisine offer a break from turbulent times

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Princess Lobster Roll — steamed Maine lobster with caviar and crème wasabi sauce.

Photograph by Joe Vaughn

Good food brings comfort. Add a peaceful place where you can eat, and you have a little window through which to lock out the troubled world and let the soul marinate.

Our parents or grandparents did much the same by going to the movies in the Depression years of the 1930s. Movie houses, with their opulent interiors, sweeping red-velvet stage curtains, and the great old pipe organs rising out of their pits were pure escapism.

Around these parts, when we’re as close to those Depression-era times as Michigan has ever been, Godaiko in Novi is a restaurant to fit the times. It’s definitely not luxury dining, a few steps away from white-linen, and far more in line with a restraint that many people are currently feeling.

Today, with theater-quality viewing possible on our in-home wide screens, restaurants are where we go to escape, where we gather and immerse ourselves in a little luxury, an oasis of life as we wish it would always be.

Godaiko is dialed-back and yet very handsome, a cavernous space with an Asian-urban look. It has a soothing and uncomplicated modern décor, as well as very good Americanized Japanese food, with prices befitting turbulent times.

The four-page menu ranges from $5.50 for appetizers to entrées topping out at about $25. Only two items are up in the stratospheric range of $38 and $39 — a rather stark reminder of fat times that are no more.

Godaiko has two locations: Novi and Ann Arbor. Though they occupy standard suburban-sprawl sites, both restaurants themselves are a delight to the eye.

The Novi restaurant sits at the rear of the mammoth Fountain Walk Mall that fronts 12 Mile Road. Despite its 12 Mile address, Godaiko is actually at least a half-mile south, on the end of the mall that edges I-96, between the movie theater and the Great Indoors store. The good news: There’s plenty of parking.

Likewise, the Ann Arbor location is south of I-94 in the Oak Valley complex, which also houses an Outback Steakhouse. The menu at the Ann Arbor Godaiko offers greater variety, most likely due to that area’s globally savvy customers.

Ann Arbor is intimate, while Novi is more open with high ceilings and echoing acoustics. Though the tall glass front in Novi looks out onto the parking lot, once inside, you’re ushered into a pleasing, hip, urban world. The host station is offset by a semi-circular stone block wall, the back of which has been made into an attractive garden bed of illuminated, polished black rocks. A rolling techno-disco sound wafts softly in the background as a sleek, minidress-clad hostess leads us to one of the blond-wood booths that are joined in quadrants and topped here and there with massive ceramic vases.
Bolts of colorful cloth cascade from the 20-foot ceiling, while the tables are set with simple four-sided ceramic dishes with lovely curved lines in white and pale green.

In Novi, the menu includes a fairly good run of sushi, but the main menu is geared more to Western tastes. On a recent visit, the first dish to arrive is the traditional miso soup, a very large bowl of rich, smoky, and denser broth than I usually find in Japanese restaurants. It’s deeper and spicier.
Of the first courses sampled, the best is a Shrimp Gyoza, delicately steamed and fried dumplings with a skin so thin and light that it’s almost translucent.

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