Sushizanmai is a chain franchise Sushi restaurant in Japan, and it is perhaps the largest Sushi chain restaurant in Japan. If you watch TV in Japan, you will often see Sushizanmai's TV commercials. It is one of the most successful Sushi restaurant. All of Sushizanmai's restaurant are open 24 hours as well, so you could enjoy sushi 3AM in the morning. People may think Sushizanmai only offers cheap quality sushi, but it is not the case. Sushizanmai's sushi has high quality and the service is said to be incredible.
Since we were visiting Japan, Sushizanmai is a must try place for us. There are many Sushizanmai restaurants in Tokyo, so we went to the Sushizanmai restaurant located at Ueno since we were just there. We got there at around 5PM, just a bit before the dinner time. There were already so many people there and the restaurant was nearly full. The waiter did not speak perfect English, but we were able to communicate and order what we wanted. We ordered a Tuna set, an Eel Roll, and Salmon Sushi.
Our food was served rather quickly. When the food is ready from the kitchen or from the Sushi chef, they would yell it out. So the restaurant is considered to be noisy since there could be many people yelling at the same time.
The salmon sushi was not up to par to us. We have had better salmon sushi in North America. This may due to the fact that salmon is not popular in Japan and they may be using different type of salmon. The salmon sushi served here also has skin attached to it, so we did not like it much. The eel roll was ok, but we were used to having Unagi instead of Anago. We preferred to have Unagi, which is sea eel with less bones.
The best thing here is the tuna set. It was so amazing. Tuna set came with 2 pieces of fatty tuna sushi, 2 pieces of medium fatty tuna sushi, 2 pieces of regular tuna sushi, 3 pieces of tuna roll, 2 pieces of tuna onion sushi, and 2 pieces of seared tuna sushi. The fatty tuna sushi is so amazing. The tuna meat simply melted in our mouth without taking a bite at it. Even for the regular tuna sushi without much fat, the tuna meat still simply melts in our mouth. It was just so fresh. The seared tuna sushi was so good too. It was seared perfect with some smoky taste and with some saltiness.
Overall, we liked the place a lot. We would just go again and do the tuna set again. It was unfortunate that we did not get to try the corn tempura. It was one of the recommended dish from the restaurant. We would definitely try that next time,
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