patrick and i got back from a three-week vacation in vietnam, japan, and vancouver. we ate lots of food on our trip, some of it delicious and some of it terrible. while in japan and vancouver we ate sushi. it was great. (some of it is featured above; this sushi was served by a ninja at a ninja-themed restaurant). the best sushi was, in fact, in the airport in tokyo. tuna so red and wasabi so green and pacific makeral with this crazygood texture.
ummmum! how we loved the sushi.
flash forward to April 19th, about a month after our amazing airport meal. we hadn't saskaspooned in a long time, so we were pretty excited. however, like most things, our next adventure was not going to be easy.
patrick's ipod with the urbanspoon application was in his truck. "let's just use the website," i suggested, but we both felt as though that would go against tradition. We enjoy shaking the ipod to get the restaurant -- and you can't shake the website. it just wouldn't seem right to click a button instead of shake the ipod. so we went out to the truck, got the ipod, and tried to connect to the internet but my wireless doesn't seem to extend past the boundaries of my lawn. (sorry neighbours. no stealing from me, i'm afraid). rather than go back into the house, patrick drove us to the parking lot of my library, where the wireless does extend past the walls. (the library is very committed to freedom of information, it seems).
so we shook the ipod and got.....New Island Sushi. "Which one?" asked, knowing that there was a New Island Sushi recently opened up downtown that I had always wanted to try.
"it's the old one, up near circle drive," he said, and we felt a bit sad -- no one wants to eat sushi n a restaurant stuck between a Brick and a cowboy boot wholesaler's. but saskaspooning had spoken, and we had to obey.
so we drove up to the restaurant, on the corner of Quebec and the freeway, and headed inside. turns out it was All You Can Eat sushi for 13.99$ a piece for lunch, with the caveat that you have to pay for all the sushi you don't consume. when we sat down there was no one else in there besides a table with an odd assortment of sort-of-goth, sort-of-emo teens with uncombed hair, bad skin, and a middle-aged man i took to be a father.
"birthday party?" wondered patrick, explaining the presence of the older gentleman as a kindly father paying for his kid's friends to eat sushi after a late night sleepover party, but i worried he was some sort of pied piper to the disenfranchised who weren't attractive enough to be emo or angry enough to be goth.
the waitress (not a ninja this time, just a regular teenager new to the english language) gave us a plasticized menu with a grease pencil; we were to write in the quantity of each item we wanted. after we ate the menu would be wiped clean, ready for the next glutton to write down 6 dragon rolls and 5 orders of gyoza, or whatever.
we ordered too much food, of course. and unfortunately none of it was very good. the miso soup was okay, but it came with plastic spoons, which felt depressing, as was the fact that patrick's bowl was cracked and leaking, meaning he either had to eat the soup very fast, or let it leak all over a pile of napkins.
the sushi wasn't so hot, either. the rice tasted kind of stale, or something, and there was far too much mayonnaise on the rolls. (why mayonnaise is on sushi at all has always caused me pause). we were sort of disheartened by the whole meal, which of course paled in comparison to the sushi in japan and vancouver. perhaps if we had travelled to spain and toledo, we would have thought this was great, but we'd been to sushiland, and we knew what we were missing.
needless to say, we didn't finish our meal. we had to pay extra for the leftovers, of which we had too much. at first i thought the waitress was going to charge us 30$ for the extra pieces--when she said that i was about to cram the sushi into my mouth, mayonaisey mango and all. but then i realized she only said, "Three", not "thirty", and i felt okay about leaving the leftovers behind.
No comments:
Post a Comment