All-You-Can-Eat Sushi

My husband and I consider ourselves sushi connisseours, and very selective about the quality, taste and freshness of our favorite food. Therefore, prior to going out for sushi on our last outing, I sat down and really THOUGHT about where I wanted to consume my food. There are several "All-You-Can-Eat" sushi joints in Vegas, but there are few that have reasonable prices, good service and fresh fish. "Fresh fish"....that's almost an oxymoron in this town. Who has fresh fish in the middle of the desert, one might ask? Well...let me tell you! Here are our top three choices in our dining experiences so far:

*Sushi Boy Desu*: The absolute freshest fish around, but the absolute slowest service. This is a family owned joint, and we are always greeted with respect and promptly seated. However, they are slower than a snail stuck in molasses when it comes to service. Our standard experience with them is as follows: we run in frantically with big eyes and growling bellies. We sit down and order more sushi than necessary to squelch the appetite of a sumo-wrestler, and then we wait..and we wait. We do get our first round of green tea right away and are immediately served dime-sized pieces of very fresh sushi, which we fight over like starved wolves determining who eats first and which one is alpha. "Mine!" "No, mine!!" It can get quite nasty. In less than two minutes, the sushi is gone and we are once again waiting....for approximately fifteen to twenty minutes for the next course. The course finally arrives, but there are only another five pieces and a center piece of the tiniest, most microscopic pile of ginger one has ever seen, sliced into air-thin pieces. AHHH! Yes, it make me scream everytime. I firmly believe that this waiting thing they do is done purposefully to make the customers take the time to get full, and perhaps won't be able to eat all they have ordered, and this way their very scarce qauntities of desert fish will not be wasted by overly-satiated patrons with eyes bigger than their stomachs.

We were too hungry to go there tonight. On to the next choice.....

*Sushi Mon*: A tiny little join wayyy on the other side of town. I was very hungry and wasn't sure that I wouldn't drop like a fly right on the sidewalk if I did not consume sushi, and SOON, but this was not the main reason I did not choose Sushi Mon on that particularly hungry day. Here is an account of our last experience with Sushi Mon; grab onto your seats, for you are about to have a very enlightening and slightly disheartening experience about All-You-Can-Eat Sushi. We walked into Sushi Mon and encountered a long wait, which is typical since it is such a teeny-tiny and packed little joint, waited for a few minutes, and then we were seated at the bar. Ok..fine. I am hungry enough to be shoved in like sardines and elbow to elbow with these full strangers without smiles on their faces. (There is a reason for the shortage of smiles, believe me). Not only are these patrons not smiling, but they are being particulary careful with their food, passing their little sushi plates around and then asking, "Did I order this or did you?" "No NOOOO don't touch that one..that's MINE!" I hear in the background. This explanation was NOT stated due to hunger, which is the frightening thing. The waitress promptly greets us and asks for a drink order. She returns with a broad smile and sweetly cooes, "Are you ready to order?" "Absolutely!" I replied in anticipation and with a smile to match hers. Ever so sweetly, as to not offend, she whispers with another smile, "Have you eaten here before?" "Yes, of course", I responded with pride. "Great! Then you are familiar with 'The Rules' as listed on your menus on the table...perhaps you could kindly look over them one more time just to refresh your memory". "Oh, you mean the Nazi-speak on your menus...gotcha...we already know them by heart", my husband sarcastically replied with a coy smile broader than the parting of The Red Sea. "Richard, be nice!" I exclaimed in exasperation, but then I peered in awe at the menu and remembered the source of his cynicism. The following is a list of "The Rules" of Sushi Mon, as written by the owners (and in very broken English):

1. Rice is a part of the sushi. Eat it all! Don't make us charge you A La Carte prices for All- You-Can eat meal when we see rice leftover on your plate;

2. NO SHARING! No sharing unless it's with your other All-You-Can- Eat patrons. The only thing that can be shared is rice! (Wow what's with this rice pre-occupation of theirs? Wait, they just said that rice is a part of the sushi..I wonder if I can bend this rule and share my fish? I am thinking of ways I can get past this rule without being kicked out);

3. NO LEFTOVERS! Take your time when ordering. Sushi is to be enjoyed, piece by piece, and not to be wasted. (Does this apply when I order something new and did not enjoy it, I wonder..I could perhaps bend this one, too, if I pretend I don't enjoy it. Oh but I dooooo enjoy it...oh well.)

4. No SHARING of food with children of all ages, except the sharing of rice. (Drop the rice fettish already! Besides, didn't they just mention the importance of the damned rice in two other rules?!).

I could go on and on, but the list is quite daunting and if one does not follow 'The Rules', ones gets booted out, never to return. Yikes!

So, we decided on that one particular night, to eat at my absolute favorite, Todai. The following was my last experience with the Todai All-You-Can-Eat restaurant:

We are seated promptly, with no wait. They are accomodating towards our huge baby stroller and the normally-screaming baby that resides inside of it, except that they ask us if we would take a table off to the side a bit further away from the bar. Hey, I can handle that. There are no "rules" listed on the menu, and no mention of rice at all. There are a couple of drawbacks we normally face here though. We ya go:

They hide the green bottles of low sodium soy sauce. Why? We all prefer the low sodium stuff nowdays, so I can probably safely assume that they are thinking that if most of us don't see the sauce on the table, we won't go through the trouble of asking for it. NOT! Stop bogarting the sauce, Todai! And when one needs those tiny little dishes one uses to put the soy and wasabi sauce into, they cannot be found. WHY? We like our sushi in sauce! Sheesh! The only other drawback I have is that Todai tries to make things that pass for sushi, but are virtually unidentifiable. For example, during this most recent dining experience, they had JELLYFISH wrapped up in seaweed and rice. WTF? Yeah you heard me. Stringy slimy tentacles that somehow manage to taste crunchy. The taste is disguised by the sweet sauce they marinate the stuff in, and by sesame seeds. Ok...I'll pass. Next on the unidentifiable list (I had to ASK someone what it was), was clams. Yeah I know you are thinking, "clams come in tiny little shells and are very identifiable). Nope...not raw clams at Todai. They put these tiny raw clams (three of them) all together on top of rice in a small plastic cup, and that is supposed to pass for sushi. Well, for me, it passed for Abby Normal's brain, sitting in a jar on the shelf in Frankenstein. You know the types of jars I mention...the kind sitting on counters in Southern Mom N' Pop conveniences stores in Georgia, Kentucky and Alabama. The "Pickled Jar". You Southerners know precisely what I mean, too! The "Pickled Jar" looks like someone's eight grade science experiment waiting to be dissected. It containst anything from Pickled Pigs Feet to Pickled Chicken Claws, or even Pickled Eggs...none of which sound appetizing.

So overall, if you ask for soy sauce, steal a tiny soy sauce plate, and avoid the unidentifiables, Todai is a nice place to consume All-You-Can-Eat sushi.