North Miami Beach

305-945-8079 In a town where sushi is served everywhere, from normal Japanese restaurants to kosher tea rooms, it's hard to pick just one as the best. If it's fashionable elegance you're after, Bond Street and Nobu can't be beat. If you put your faith in native Japanese chefs, head for Matsuri or Sushi Deli at the Japanese Market in North Bay Village. And if you're looking for "white tuna," head anywhere but Siam River, where chef Kevin Cory, a sushi stickler, refuses to serve the unaccountably popular faux fish. (It's not tuna at all; most often it is escolar, a fish that causes an allergic reaction in many people.) What you will find at Cory's sushi bar (several years old but still something of an insider's secret owing to its location in an out-of-the-way Thai restaurant) is something hard-core sushi mavens most crave: our town's freshest seafood. Local catches of the day, straight from the docks at Haulover, were swimming just hours earlier; exotics are flown in fresh. What you'll never find here is frozen fish being passed off as fresh, an unethical practice all too common in Miami.