Exploring Sushi

I've never eaten sushi before, but I ate it for the first time yesterday. Will I ever again? Probably, but not any time soon. I always found it intriguing, but I think it was mostly from an art perspective. After all, it's pretty food.

Rachyl and Tony got hold of Sue the other day and asked her if we wanted to go out for sushi for dinner on Saturday. After some discussion it was decided that midday might be better crowd-wise, so we agreed to go for lunch yesterday. Sarah was in town so we picked her up and took her as well. She has been to sushi places several times with her friend and their family. What do you call people that like sushi? Sushi heads? Well, that's them. Anyway, I knew Sarah would like to go and I was right.

It was an interesting place. I know people that have been to sushi places will probably say "duh" when I describe the layout, but hey--It's new to me okay? The chefs were in the center of the place with a moving conveyor belt looping around them. The customers were located around the belt (for obvious reasons). They have a menu "chart" that separated the menu items into price zones, each identified by a unique color. The sushi items that were circulating on the belt thing were on plates of their price colors. Here's what I found on the web about their pricing: Yellow: $1.50, Sky Blue: $2.00, Orange: $2.50, Purple: $3.00, and Blue: $3.50. At the end of your meal, they count up your used plates to calculate your bill. I noticed the people next door had a stack of plates that were all yellow when they were all done eating, so they apparently opted to keep themselves in the cheapest price zone.

Here's how we "newbies" did it: The conveyor carries and interesting item by our booth. We say, "Ooo, what's that?" We find it on the menu, read about it, and decide we'd like to try it. By then it's long gone. Maybe another will come by. What usually happened is the same thing over and over again. By the time we were done "window shopping" and wondering about things, the belt thing had probably went completely around several times (and it's a LONG belt). Finally we started grabbing things. Sarah and Rachyl were fairly confident about what they liked and wanted. Tony just grabbed stuff--Mostly the deep-fried, common stuff. I was a little more tentative about what I grabbed. Sue didn't get a lot of stuff because her stomach wasn't feeling all that great when we first got there, but she indulged as well. By the time we were all finished, we had quite a pile of plates. I think we agreed that half were Tony's. You can click the picture for a full size, but it's kind of substandard because it was shot with my phone. Sarah is on my left just out of the picture. Rachyl and Sue were both probably asking Tony when he was going to stop (you can see his chopsticks in action):

 

My perception of sushi really hasn't changed much. I always saw sushi as mostly rice, seaweed, and raw fish. After yesterday's visit to the Blue Island Sushi place in Federal way, I can honestly say that sushi is rice, seaweed, and raw fish. Oh yeah--With occasional deep-fried and dessert items as well. I did manage fairly well with chopsticks, so I viewed that as a sort of a cool thing. Nothing was dropped, nor did any of my food fly into the next booth or anyone's lap.

Was it good? Yeah, what I ate was okay. See, I've never placed rice real high on my food list. It's very good in lots of things, but by itself, not much. I guess I look at it as sort of a "world hunger space filler" sort of thing. If you're going to give me a starchy space filler give me potatoes. LOTS of potatoes!

Will I go back? Yeah, but like I said--Not anytime soon. That will do me for a while. I did decide though that next time I want to sit at one of the "counter" seats that faced the conveyor instead of a booth. It looked much easier to deal with.