Pesto, Cheese, and Salmon on Rice

Caution: writing this post made me super-hungry. Reading this post may make you super-hungry and/or in a mood for sushi probably more expensive than this. You’ve been warned.

This weekend’s been quite packed with a major event falling on each day: on Saturday, the Japanese culture class’ trip to Sankeien garden (words cannot describe how beautiful this place is so I’m installing a gallery plug-in instead for the post I hope to up); and on Sunday a trip to go see traditional horseback archery in action at Zushi (also to be covered in a future post). But once was all said and done with the yabusame, my group — having replaced not having had breakfast with a light lunch consisting of a frankfurter sans bun and a bottle of ramune — decided we’d eat at Sushiro, a restaurant a train stop away from Yokohama Station. Sushiro’s notable for being a restaurant that sells all of its plates of sushi at 105 yen (100 yen + 5 yen consumption tax).

Sushiro is a kaiten-zushi (“revolving sushi”) place, where sushi simply rides a conveyor belt tempting customers. But, for those who don’t readily see what they want, they have touchscreen menus that you can order anything with, including non-sushi items such as udon, karaage, French fries (?!), desserts, and so on. When they’re ready for you, the chefs will place them on the conveyor belt and the menu gadget will signal to you that your food is coming; your order is served on top of a stand indicating that it’s for your table. Most sushi platters come with a dab of wasabi on the inside by default, denoted by the yellow plate it’s served on; certain other sushi types (such as tamago, egg) do not, denoted by the white plate. (The touchscreen has a small button allowing wasabi-less order of items that come with wasabi.)

As I’d thought, Sushiro focuses more on nigiri than on the rolls popular in Western sushi restaurants (though they do serve some); and, of course, some of the things popular with American sushi lovers aren’t to be seen here (good-bye, California roll, good-bye!). In lieu of that, there are a pair of other dishes that caught my eye —

The first one is the salted beef kalbi sushi, perhaps the closest analog I can find to American teriyaki chicken sushi. Not as cold as the more fishy offerings, but just as melt-in-your-mouth delicious. No wasabi option available (though I suppose you can attempt to add some). As shown above, it comes with a light garnish of onions to accentuate the flavor. An interesting thing I noted is that the beef sort of seemed to taste like pepperoni…I’ve not had kalbi here yet, so I’m not sure what’s up with that, but I can at least tell you I don’t have as much of a craving for pizza as I did two days ago.

The second is their basil salmon sushi, which is actually an upgrade of their cheese salmon sushi (not pictured). The green topping there is a basil pesto sauce, the likes of which I sadly hadn’t seen in a while. It’s quite nice, actually — it takes the taste of salmon and instead of stopping there finishes off with a creamy pesto flavor. This is a dish I kept on returning back to — a third of what I ordered consisted of plates of this — so I was a bit surprised that I was the only one chowing down on this.

With sushi (albeit 100-yen sushi) crossed off my Japanese food list, I’ve got plans to hit up a yakiniku place with some friends next week. Do look forward to the ensuing post and complaints about my food coma! ◆