worst sushi i've ever eaten in a restaurant
Sunday, February 22, 2009
My wife and I love sushi but I promise we are not sushi snobs... we've eaten at some of the top places in LA, but almost every week I also eat sushi from grocery stores and even the engineering cafe (convenience store) at UCLA (Kikka bento boxes delivered daily). I'm also not name-dropping any restaurants because that's not the point. We're not connected to any sushi or restaurant business, we're grad students. And we didn't come in here expecting anything - we were walk ins from the street.
We're kind of traditionalists, so we ordered nigiri (salmon, tuna, spanish mackerel, and yellowtail), a wild red salmon roll, miso, and hot sake. The sake and miso tasted watered down. (We know hot sake is not the best quality, but it shouldn't taste bad.) The salmon was barely edible. Then I had a piece of the tuna, which had that "hot pink foam rubber" look to it. It had such a bad, fishy aftertaste, I honestly felt sick. Then my wife tried the mackerel and literally could not swallow it. Mackerel has a strong flavor -- we know -- we eat it all the time. The yellowtail was slimy and off... like, if sushi fish could taste stale, that's what it tasted like to me. By this point we were both actually feeling pretty ill.
The wild red salmon roll was OK. I ate three of the pieces and a lot of ginger just to clean my mouth.
I have never sent food back at a restaurant, but if just one or two of the things had been obviously "off", we would have asked for something else. But almost everything was so unappetizing we just paid the bill and left ASAP. I felt bad because there was obviously a lot of food left.
The staff was all very friendly, and there were a lot of people there having a good time (and a lot of positive reviews here), so maybe we just got unlucky... but it was truly bad.
Pros: Friendly staff, good location.
Cons: Food was not edible.