Chef Pat Dao serves up the scorpion sushi at Cowtown's newest Japanese-themed eatery.

Cowtown Sushi 2225 W Southlake Blvd, No. 411, Southlake. 817-310-0089. Lunch: Mon-Fri. 11am-2:30pm; Dinner: Sun-Thurs 5pm-10pm, Fri-Sat 5pm-11pm. All major credit cards accepted.

A Southlake restaurant has to be superlative for us to suggest it's worth the long drive from Fort Worth, but the newly opened Cowtown Sushi makes the recommendation easy, especially if you're not afraid of sushi with attitude.

The Cowtown Sushi experience begins in the foyer, where a floor-to-ceiling waterfall, gently backlit in blue, welcomes you into a tranquil escape. Then step into the dining area, where the dim and romantic lighting, dark ceramic floor tiles, and walls painted to look like stone gardens create a lovely, elegant mood, perfect for fine dining.

While you may be tempted to accept a menu from a hostess and follow her to a seat to order from the kitchen, first take a gander at the sushi bar. It's built of two kinds of polished marble -- black and light brown -- with wood trim all around. It proved so inviting one recent visit that it made the rest of the restaurant seem as distant as another planet.

A good sushi bar is truly intimate. It's typically just you and the chef separated by a glass shelf filled with all manner of raw fish and vegetables. This simple aesthetic can be found in nearly every sushi bar in the world. But at Cowtown Sushi, a relatively tiny space in a strip mall, it's all accented by a playful air, courtesy of the friendly staff. When I ordered two pieces each of the salmon (name sake) and tuna (maguro), the hostess laughed. "What are you?" she said. "A conservative? How about letting me order for you?"

I asked her why. She laughed again. "Because we are a sushi bar in Texas," she said. "We do things differently here."

I said OK, and she said something in Japanese to the chef, who looked at me, smiled, and said, "You will like it."

A few minutes and one ice cold Kirin Light later, a plate came carrying four pieces of sushi in the flavors I had ordered but ... different. Each was about as big as a car muffler. Normally, a piece of nigiri sushi -- a tiny slice of fish atop an equally tiny, compact bed of rice -- can be eaten in a single bite. Not so these bad boys. The fish slices -- bright orange salmon, deep reddish tuna -- were each two inches long and more than an inch wide.

"Texas-sized," the hostess said with a smile. "Forget the chop sticks and eat with your fingers."

Two of the pieces -- one salmon, one tuna -- came traditional-style; the other two, Cowtown Sushi-style. Of the traditional versions, the salmon was ultra-fresh and moist; the tuna, meaty and rich; and the sticky rice that accompanied both, plump and light. The Cowtown Sushi-styled versions, however, really let the restaurant's 'tude come through. The salmon was topped with a paper-thin slice of still-sweating lemon, complete with rind. The hostess told me to just eat it, rind an all. Of course, I obeyed -- and was thankful I did. The lemon drew out the flavor of the salmon with a crisp, tart, delicious zing. As for the tuna, it was gently coated in a light garlic oil that added bite without overpowering the fish's natural succulent flavor. Pretty tasty.

The next plate was one of the hostess' surprises -- two slices of fresh water eel (unagi) and a piece of fatty tuna (toro). The eel arrived warm, the fish dipped in thick soy, laced with roasted sesame seeds, then affixed to the bed of sticky rice with a seaweed wrap. The first taste came on kinda sweet, but it soon expanded to encompass everything from sour to tangy to oily to bitter, each flavor equally potent. This delicacy was so buttery-soft and dense, you could easily order several and call it a night.

Toro is often tough and tasteless. Here, with the size of the slice so large, both of those drawbacks were accentuated. Still, some people love it, and this version was, like the rest of the fish here, super fresh, so my quibbling has more to do with personal preference than with the quality of Cowtown Sushi's kitchen.

The last plate, another of the hostess' surprises, was one helluva capper -- to the meal and, if you've been following the headlines recently, the past month: Two oversized slices of salmon, rubbed down in a cajun spice mix that drew out the flavor of the fish and then tangoed with it. The flavor is so mind-blowing that you may never look at sushi the same way again.

With a lot of talent and a little daring, Cowtown Sushi does the near-impossible, transforming the simple and delicious into the exotic and sumptuous. Yippie ki yay.