As we all remember, I go out for sushi every couple of months with some friends of mine and, for the last few of those outings, I have been completely nonplussed by the experience.
This time, when the invite inevitably came, I was ready to turn it down. I asked if they cared if we went somewhere else and they all agreed.
I recently became aware of a different place near the Italian market where I occasionally shop. I looked up this new sushi place and saw that it had some great reviews and people applauded its "inspired" menu.
Sounded good to me!
So we went there and...well... I had some concerns when I got there because...literally everything was sticky. The tables, the floors, the back of the chairs, it was weird. They were advertising Happy Hour but they also had a sign on the door that said they were hiring bartenders. They also were hiring "high quality waitstaff", which made me think we'd be waiting...for the staff...
The place was dark and very muggy. We were there just before 5pm so I think they must turn off the A/C until the dinner rush is going to start.
But, knowing this now, I can say...there wasn't any rush. And you know things are going to be odd when almost the entire waitstaff are white guys...in a sushi restaurant...
Anyway...
Now, all that being said, the selection they had of sushi was much better than the last place. They even had some of the little nibbles that my friends had wanted to find but couldn't. Plus, the menu included things like Pepper Steak and General Tso's for people who were looking for a more robust dining option.
They didn't have wonton soup, sadly, but they did have the lovely spicy crabstick salad that I love and was craving!
I ended up getting a roll that was tempura shrimp with cream cheese and cucumber. I terrified the waiter with my wasabi order, but I ate 2/3rds of it.
The biggest drawback to this new place was that, when I ordered my entirely necessary Diet Coke...they didn't bring me one. I don't mean they forgot...no...I mean...they didn't have Diet Coke.
Our waiter...this was his first day...he didn't know that they didn't have Diet Coke until I ordered it and the thing he brought me wasn't, in fact, Diet Coke. I asked: "when I asked for Diet Coke, did they actually only have Diet Pepsi?" because that's what it tasted like. And he said, oh, no, its not even Pepsi. It is a cheap knockoff brand that's just called "cola", or, in my case "diet cola". It was awful. He asked if I wanted to try something else and I said: "No, I don't think I want to risk it on Dr. Paprika, or whatever."
And they only put two cubes of ice in it and no ice at all in the glass of water!
Not off to a great start, sadly, but the salad was excellent and the sushi roll was delicious. It was like the food was just done by someone with way better management than whoever it was running the rest of the place. The price wasn't bad either, although "happy hour" only took two dollars off the cost of the sushi roll.
Sushi! But this time its disappointing... < absolutefutility > 2026-05-06 05:01
Last time I had sushi, I had some version of it that came wrapped up in pink bean paper or something stupid like that. I tried to like it but I couldn't. This time, I looked through the whole menu and nothing else sounded as good as the one that had the awful pink bean paper. I was going to ask if they could just make it with the nori instead but it said: "no substitutions" at the top of the page!
We were not amused.
I picked a different roll that sounded good but...it was not so great. I ended up disassembling it and eating the shrimp, crabstick and asparagus innards. Even drowning it in soy sauce couldn't help.
The saddest part was that I stumbled across a new sushi restaurant on the way to this one but no one wanted to try a "new" place, they wanted to go to the OLD place.
And, by "old", I mean we'd been there twice before! Our real "old" place closed down after years of dwindling interest. They had great sushi but an A/C unit that was sporadic at best and spiteful at worst.
This place we're going to now has a really cute waiter and I think that's the only real reason we keep ending up there.
This time, while the rest of us got sushi, one person got bibimbap. This last thing is Korean, actually, and is kinda like the Korean equivalent of fajitas. It comes out in a sizzling-hot stone bowl; its meat and veggies and a fried egg on top. It smelled good, but I could tell it was spicy as hell when they set it on the table and I wasn't going to have any of that.
I think I've mentioned a few times before that I had a problem with spicy things. I have figured out, over the years since it started, that my problem seems to be limited to the capsaicin in the peppers. This is what makes peppers spicy - from the lowly banana pepper at around 100 Scoville units all the way up to the Carolina Reaper at about 2,000,000 Scoville units! Sometimes, I'm so sensitive to capsaicin that Ketchup can be too spicy.
I know, someone is going to whine that tomatoes don't have it, but they have the ability to make it in their genes... THAT is how sensitive I am!
So what do you do if you like a lil spicy now and then?
You switch to isothiocyanate!
Isothiocyanate is the chemical, the "capsaicin" of things like horseradish, mustard and wasabi.
For whatever reason, as sensitive as I am to capsaicin, I am NOT sensitive to isothiocyanate. I can eat raw horseradish and not even break a sweat. I can have wasabi an inch thick on my sushi and be: "gee, that's a lovely tang!" I can eat spicy mustard on anything and it doesn't bother me at all: try Colman's English Mustard if you don't think that's a feat!
But, even today, a thick layer of wasabi couldn't make the sushi better. I was nonplussed.