Mushi Ni finds a permanent home for its melting pot of Asian flavors

Michael Le, one of the owners of Mushi Ni, likes to joke that he’s a “bad Asian.”

His parents, first-generation immigrants from Vietnam, raised him in Missouri, where they did their best to assimilate into American culture, Le told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He grew up eating TV dinners and his first restaurant job as a teenager was at White Castle, yet he still managed to fall in love with cooking.

When he went to culinary school in Los Angeles, he quickly learned he was way behind his peers in terms of knowledge of Asian cuisine.

Much of Le’s Asian food education came from his wife, Tanya Jimenez, who grew up in the Philippines and now runs the kitchen day to day at Mushi Ni’s new Inman Park location. The couple, who met cooking in the hypercompetitive fine-dining kitchens of New York, pour the entire melting pot of their combined experiences into the cooking at Mushi Ni.

The result is an ebullient pan-Asian menu that’s occasionally messy, sometimes spectacular and irrefutably unique. Casual and constantly changing, Mushi Ni is the kind of restaurant that forms the backbone of a great food city.

Mushi Ni, which means “slow cooked” in Japanese, grew organically out of a pop-up Jimenez and Le started while working as restaurant consultants in Newnan. The couple moved the business intown when they opened a stall in East Atlanta Village’s now-defunct We Suki Suki food hall, then found a new home at the Chattahoochee Food Works.

For their brick-and-mortar restaurant in Inman Park, Jimenez and Le partnered with Vicbrands, the company behind restaurants like Victory Sandwich Shop, which has a location on the same block.

That gradual growth made Jimenez and Le expert bootstrappers, as evidenced in Mushi Ni’s Inman Park location. The restaurant space, largely built out by Jimenez, Le and their team, is simultaneously stripped down and full of personality. Warm lighting softens the hard edges of steel and plywood; pulsing music and neon add to the gauzy atmosphere.

The vibe alone could pull in crowds from the Atlanta Beltline’s Eastside Trail, which has a spur into Inman Park that practically touches Mushi Ni’s front door. But the prices — fantastically low for this level of cooking — will almost guarantee the restaurant’s seats are filled.

Cocktails are $12, and these aren’t college bar vodka-sodas.

A jasmine-ginger highball has all the sophistication of similar drinks at much more expensive Japanese restaurants, while the Thai tea martini has a balanced sweetness that doesn’t overwhelm the tea’s depth. A lychee mojito fizzes with refreshing flavor, and it’s served in a pint glass — Mushi Ni does not mess around with small pours.

Many of the restaurant’s appetizers are less than $10, including several absolute gems.

I loved a dish called “midnight snack,” a bowl of creamy green curry gravy served with seared, delightfully flaky roti for dipping. The name evokes the image of someone sneaking a few leftovers from the fridge and finding a deeply satisfying combination of items that they wouldn’t have considered for a regular meal. There’s no animal protein in the dish, so it’s fully vegan — what might be a guilty pleasure at midnight feels sinless and tastes divine at dinner.

Dumpling dishes like the chili pork pot stickers and shrimp dim sum are both $9 but come in generous five-piece portions. At this price point, Mushi Ni could get away with serving their dumplings unadorned, straight from the steamer, but they arrive nicely dressed and plated.

It’s easy to see Jimenez and Le’s fine-dining backgrounds in the way they layer and plate dishes like the eggplant and Brussels sprouts, or their beautifully composed bowls of chop suey. But their artfulness bites them a bit with one dish: their smoked fish dip.

The dish is beautiful on the plate, with several small, separate scoops of fish dip layered among sculptural rice chips, then garnished with colorful veggies like cilantro sprigs and sliced red and yellow peppers. But the rice chips touching the fish dip (i.e., most of them) lose their crisp texture in a nanosecond. Individually, the components are tasty, but the undeniably beautiful plating is the dish’s Achilles’ heel.

Another mainstay of fine dining, duck confit, was served as the filling for one of the only bao buns I didn’t love. The texture of the duck reminded me of meat from a slow cooker — tender to the point of lacking texture. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t reach the depth of flavor found elsewhere on the menu.

The rest of the bao buns had flavor literally and figuratively spilling out of them. The tender, steamed buns provided nice support to rich, hearty beef brisket and saucy, piquant bang-bang cauliflower. My favorite was filled with crispy hunks of fresh, sweet soft-shell crab.