Usually when I go home to MD, I have a set list of my favorite places that I go to but unfortunately my two favorite sushi places are in VA, so it is a bit of trek to go there. It was a crappy Friday night and my mom, Mike and I wanted to stay local so they found this place on Yelp that got fairly decent reviews. I was down to find a good sushi place that was closer to home and luckily this place was a 10 min drive from our house.
I'm definitely not trying to sh*t on the suburbs so much but I am quite judgey when I comes to restaurants in strip malls but hey, there are definitely exceptions to the rule. This place was tucked away in a random strip mall on Rockville Pike and it would be super easy to drive past it if you weren't looking for it. As expected, there is zero ambience to speak of here and it's pretty much a sterile take-out place but big enough for a few tables and chairs.
The place is actually run by Chinese people so of course my mom goes to town in trying to be best friends with them - which actually did turn out to be helpful. The menu is your standard hodge podge of a million take-out sushi food - lots of crazy rolls, bento boxes, noodle dishes, and fried appetizers. Normally we all love sashimi so we were prepared to order the sashimi platter but the waitress told us in Mandarin that she wouldn't recommend it - the fish is all frozen (which actually is fine because generally most sushi fish is flash frozen before being shipped out) but that it was random fish like tilapia (WTF?!). But she did say that the salmon was a good, so we ordered the Salmon Combo ($19.95) which was 3 pieces of sashimi, 3 pieces sushi, 6 piece salmon roll, 6 piece spicy salmon roll, and 1 spicy salmon cup, a yellowtail sashimi plate ($18.95), an Inner Harbor roll ($13.95) as well as a aji fry ($8.95) to start.
The aji fry was small strips of fried fish covered in panko crumbs - it's typically made with mackerel in most traditional places but they used butterfish here - not sure why. It was totally fine - I mean when has fried food ever not been tasty? The salmon combo actually turned out to be pretty good dish - I love salmon in all forms and this was a nice "greatest hits" of all things salmon and the quality of it did seem good. I could easily seem myself getting this dish on my own. The Inner Harbor roll was a typical large roll and had salmon, yellowtail, crunchy spicy scallop and avocado - all great ingredients but it was a bit too heavy on the rice to really notice the fish. The big bummer of the night was the yellowtail sashimi - as the waitress had said earlier, most of their sashimi is frozen and you could tell with this one. The middle was totally cold and with some pieces still frozen in the middle. I don't know why they couldn't let it sit out for a few minutes in room temperature to soften it up but it was very displeasing for me and you couldn't really taste the fish because you were too busy processing the fact that it was ice cold. We were still hungry afterwards and got an order of the salmon sashimi because that was clearly the best fish of the night.
This place is definitely not a comparable substitute for my usual sushi joint when I got home. It's not traditional or authentic but I don't think that's what they are trying to be anyways. If you want authentic and much better quality Japanese food on Rockville Pike, I would highly recommend Temari Cafe which is in the strip mall next door. It's run by Japanese people and you can definitely see the difference in quality. I can see this place being good for basic take out and if you stick to really standard rolls like salmon avocado or spicy tuna, you'll be just fine. I will give a shout out to the salmon combo as that was their saving grace for this review and I wish more places had a greatest hit dish like that on their menu. Total bill: $100 for 3 people with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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