Tag Archives: maki

Candy Sushi | The best example I’ve seen yet

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I was accessing my Reddit.com account and came across this pic of candy sushi- candy sushi on reddit.comhttp://i.imgur.com/HWeGL.jpg

A lovely arrangement of maki/nigiri treats.

From what I can see, fruit roll-ups were used as nori (seaweed), rice crispy treats for sushi rice, and an assortment of candies for the fillings, garnish (I spy Sour Patch Kids too!).  I thought the chef cheated a bit by using Swiss Rolls (I think) but it does a good job of throwing in some darker color to the arrangement.  Kudos (pun intended) to the chef!

I’ve seen some pretty nasty looking attempts at sweet sushi, which aren’t sushi at all. Sushi and sashimi pies, cakes and candy merely take the shape of sushi.  They also fail in representing the harmony born from combining very unique ingredients together, just the way sushi does.

What the chef has done here, though, is take ingredients that actually do resemble the sushi version and formed quite accurate models of nigiri and makimono sushi pieces.

I wonder how they taste?  Fruit Roll-Up on Rice Crispy Treats and Sour Patch Kids might be a bizarre matching but didn’t you think similarly when you encountered your first raw tuna, rice and seaweed wrap?

Waka Sushi Blew Me Away | Part 1

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So many missed opportunities

Two years since I moved to Tokyo.  Two years every morning walking to the same train station on the way to work.  Two years every evening walking home from the same train station.  Three-hundred-and-sixty-five multiplied by two equals seven-hundred-and-thirty.  That’s how many times I’ve potentially missed out on possibly the best sushi eating experience since coming to this city. Until tonight.

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Standing Sushi Bar | Ushio | Shinagawa Station

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Was in Shinagawa, Tokyo recently and had a hankerin’ for sushi but as I’ve never known Shinagawa as being famous for sushi I thought I was in for a small trek to some place more familiar and closer to home.

That was when I came across Ushio, a sushi bar located just inside the mouth of Shinagawa Station’s eastward gate.  It was easily noticeable from its nicely designed shop entrance and cheap lunch menu, so I decided to stop in for a bite.

Sushi bar Ushio

Ushio is a tachizushi bar in which customers are made to stand while ordering and eating. Back in Fukuoka where I used to live, I had an experience with another tachizushi bar and really liked it.  Tachizushi bars in Japan aren’t really that much different from other sushi restaurants.  Ushio was clean, somewhat small, adorned with wood and beer posters and the help was quite polite and cheerful.  However, it wasn’t until I stood at the counter that I noticed what made Ushio unique and made me regret eating there.

Ushio has a pretty extensive menu with lots of variety of nigiri but not much more than that – they do have kaisendon and some makimono (wrapped sushi).  However, Ushio’s real uniqueness is its ordering system.  Instead of calling out to the chefs behind the bar or having a hostess write down your orders, there are” coins” with menu items printed on them.  The coins (and most things in the restaurant) are written in Japanese and English, (which I thought was pretty neat) and when ordering, you pick up the coin with the sushi you want and place it in a little white dish upon the counter.  The chef will acknowledge your order and proceed to make the sushi fresh for you.  The cheapest coins were 90 yen while the most expensive (non-lunch set) coins were 750 yen.  Mind you, each coin is 1 piece, not 1 plate (of two pieces) you might be used to at kaitenzushi or some sushi restaurants.  The coins stay in your coin dish until you’re ready to leave.  This also helps you to remember what you ordered and how much you’re paying in case you get started on a serious sushi binge.

Ushio sushi bar coin

Unfortunately, my coin dish wasn’t so full – I only used one coin during my visit.  It wasn’t because I ordered a Nigiri Set or “Sushi lunch plate” which required only the one specially marked coin, but it was because I thought the sushi itself wasn’t on par with what I have come to expect as a sushi lover.  Believe me, if I thought otherwise, I’d have filled my dish with at least a couple more coins.

First things first, the sushi rice was very plain tasting and seemed to come straight from an electric rice cooker.   It didn’t have that distinct faintly sour-sweet fragrance or other qualities that struck me as anything but the Japanese equivalent of “Minute Rice”.  Also, while each piece of sushi on my platter was molded with care and looked picture perfect prior to being anywhere near my mouth, it would take even longer to reach it as almost every piece was molded very loosely and fell apart soon after my chopsticks grasped them.  A couple times, half the rice of one piece of sushi fell into my soy sauce with dozens of individual rice grains floating about like shipwrecked sailors.  I’ve been eating sushi a long time and this had to be one of the most frustrating times I’ve had – with or without chopsticks.  The businessmen next to me also seemed to have a hard time keeping their sushi together and soon I was done playing “man overboard” and just used my hands (which didn’t help that much).  So the rice wasn’t that good, and the sushi were fragile – yeah, it happens sometimes you might say, but this was getting ridiculous at Ushio.   Let’s move on to the fish.

Laid out before me was a 13-piece sushi lunch platter that had:

  • 1 nigiri (molded sushi) piece each of chuutoro maguro (semi-fatty tuna), salmon, kohada (Gizzard Shad), ika (squid), ni-anago (flavored eel), tamago (egg omelet), binchou maguro (some relative of tuna), ebi (cooked shrimp), hirame (flatfish) and what I believe was akagai (red clam)
  • 3 pieces of makimono, which was maguro
  • a fair portion of gari or pickled ginger
  • the meal also came with a complementary cup of green tea and a bowl of miso soup

I ate each piece with care and anticipation hoping that Ushio would show me something in substance to match its unique and customer friendly menus coins.  Rice having already been explained above, was half the problem that made me a dissatisfied customer.  The other half was that no piece of sushi on my platter tasted fresh nor had that much taste at all.  I at least expected the salmon to retain its unique fatty attributes but it did not come through – all the fish used was plain and uninteresting.  Of course, each sushi had its own texture, but that was about it.  Nothing laudable in relation to the ingredients used.  Wait, the kohada was actually quite good, but that’s because I had never had it before and my taste buds were probably put on red alert for the incoming of a strange fish.  IMHO, Ushio missed the mark with its most important asset, its sushi.

I scarfed up my sushi one by one, finished my tea and miso soup, paid and left.  From placing my order to stepping out the door it was about 25 minutes, which I thought was good timing even though it was in the middle of lunchtime.  It could very well be that it’s such an unpopular place that only curious poor saps like me eat there – but, Ushio has been there for about 2 years (according to the hostess) so they must get a fair amount of business at other peak times (evening quittin’ time, weekends, etc.)  It might be a totally different scene and level of quality that I didn’t have the good fortune to experience.

  • Good points: easy to order and fast, cheap, easy to find
  • Bad points: poor taste, felt like a jaw exercise, its basically all nigirizushi, have to stand the whole time

While I wouldn’t recommend this place for those who already like sushi, as a “practice” place, it might serve you well.  The reason being, you order by the piece and the cheapest pieces go for 90 yen, which is pretty darn good – if you are still experimenting with eating sushi, you might not want to do it at an expensive place downtown – so it won’t cost you too much at Ushio for being a tad adventurous.

Below is a final photo of the menu-poster they used to advertise their sushi lunch sets.

Ushi sushi bar menu

Ushi sushi bar menu

Shion Sushi | Kaitenzushi in Shinjuku

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Last week I had sushi at Shion Sushi, a kaitenzushi (conveyor belt style) restaurant in Shinjuku nea　Yasukuni Avenue near Kabukicho.

It was one of the most memorable sushi-eating experiences of my life.  Memorable because it was so bad.

Outside looking in

Priced at 105yen apiece, every plate at Shion, as is common in kaitenzushi places, has a duo of nigirizushi or gunkanzushi or 4-6 pieces of a makizushi roll – the price seemed right as I was pretty hungry and in the mood for sushi, and Shion just happened to be right there.  It also had a good-sized menu, though it didn’t look like it had been updated in years. The same thing goes for the shop itself.  Very Bubble Era style interior look and not a lot of promo signage or fancy fliers.  Before going in, I wondered if they were even trying.  Yet, there was already quite a crowd of customers already eating, so I figured it must be good.

On the inside

The interior of Shion presented the typical kaitenzushi layout with the preparation table in the middle with a surrounding counter for customers to sit and eat.  The chefs and all their fixings and tools are plainly visible to customers and the conveyor belt was kept full of sushi plates.  There were actually 2 tiers of conveyor belts: one for the main sushi plates and another high above (and nearly out of sight) for what reason I couldn’t guess no had time to ask before I left.

Shion sported the usual furnishings like those annoyingly uncomfortable 1.5-meter tall stools for seating.  Obviously they don’t want you get too comfortable so as to encourage you to be on your way and make way for other customers.  The stools were also placed quite close to each other so having anything more than a coat and brief made just sitting down a little cumbersome.  A sofa of plastic lined the far wall so if you’re lucky to get a seat near there, you could have a place to put your stuff.  Even so, it still felt small and even if nobody was sitting near you presently, you hope that no one ever does.

Okay, so it felt a little crammed and claustrophobic, and you might get a backache, but some sushi places are well worth the discomfort.  Unfortunately, Shion wasn’t worth it as will be explained more below.

What’s that smell? and other Red Flags

The stink of fish was the first red flag as fish if kept fresh wouldn’t stink unless there was an abundance of oily fish like saba – though saba was on the menu, I doubt they had so much stocked that would cause such a smell.  That, in addition to a second conflicting smell of cleanser made Shion one of the more offensively smelling sushi restaurants I’ve been to.  My hunger clouded my judgment here and I decided to press on and get fed.

Earthenware mugs line the counter letting you know it’s self-serve, complete with a spigot of steaming water to douse your tea pouch which is placed near the mugs.  This is common in many kaitenzushi shops but frankly, the water spigots had that white calcification you might see on cave stalagmites.  At least the water was hot.

It came from the sea

Now on to the sushi.  My (fast) meal consisted of 5 plates of nigirizushi.  As I always do at kaitenzushi, I never take from the conveyor belt, but order directly from the sushi chef.  As I made my orders, I couldn’t help but notice that nearly all the fish used in the preparation were pre-sliced and looked as if they had been taken out of 10 years of cryogenic cold-sleep (refer to the movie Alien).  Also, while I do not doubt the chefs’ (there were 2-3 of them) ability to make good sushi, what they served that day was a shock.  Here is a list of disappointments for the sushi I ate as mentioned above:

  1. Salmon – my two nigiri were from the underside of the fish with the tough white skin and the feeling of a “grissley” texture you get from accidentally eating nankotsu (soft pork bone) when you thought it was steak.  Normally, I see this part of the fish sold by itself cut away from the main body for use in other dishes, but not sushi.  This was the best they could find?
  2. Kampachi – It wasn’t on the menu, but when I asked one of the chefs, he confirmed it, which was a little troubling because I thought it was kajiki.  So I asked if they had kajiki to which I was answered with a plate of it too.
  3. Kajiki – I had always enjoyed swordfish steaks, but never had a chance to eat it in sushi form.  I got this chance twice at Shion – once, confusing it with kampachi, and again as a personal order.  This was okay, but it seemed to have stayed in the chef’s hands a little too long and tasted warm and not that flavorful save for the sweetness coming from the rice.
  4. Bintoro – My personal favorite as I don’t care for akami or chutoro.  Shion’s bintoro did not taste fresh and was also handled too much.
  5. Ikura – Ok, some of those salmon eggs were frozen – that was not enjoyable.  While biting into a trio of eggs frozen together may be interesting the first time, being a lover of ikura I was a bit disappointed.
metropolitan sushi blog shion kajiki

kajiki nigiri

So, the only things at Shion I personally felt were any good were the sushi rice – sweet and fragrant that if paired with better ingredients would be quite good – and the self-serve green tea, which for which the hot water was fine after all.

So after the 5 servings above, I felt it was time to leave.