Introduction

Since I am Japanese and enjoyed eating sushi at least once a week when I lived in Japan, people are always asking me, "so where is the best place to eat sushi. I want to hear from the expert."

I never particularly considered myself to be an expert or sushi connoisseur, but whenever my friends and I tried new sushi places, I found myself commenting about the freshness of sushi and the restaurant atmosphere, comparing to how it was in Japan. And I also found myself complaining at most places claiming things like, "this isn't really sushi" or "you would never see this in Japan (in a negative tone)" A lot of my friends, whether they agreed with me or not, were intrigued with my comments and suggested that I should try out bunch of sushi places in Seattle and rank which places are most authentic.

Before you read my reviews, I should warn you that to a lot of people in Japan, they take sushi very seriously. To become a sushi chef in Japan, you have to spend years and years learning the craft before you are allowed to stand behind the counter to serve the customers. Some are so good that they can put exacly same amout of grain of rice in each sushi. Now that is impressive. Because of that, I won't even attempt to make sushi on my own, even though I have been cooking Japanese food for many years, and I think I'm pretty good at it.

So when I go to some "sushi" restaurant and see an American chef (or even Japanese chef) in his 20s standing behind the counter, it is hard for me to take the place seriously. If some place serve sushi with side dish of kimchee, I can't rank it too high either. Don't get me wrong. I like kimchee, but sometimes, the smell of kimchee is so strong that I have a hard time tasting the sushi. Usually those places tend to have better bulgogi than sushi anyway.

My coworkers recommended some of their favorite sushi places, and I noticed that these places only offered Americanized rolls. Most of the popular rolls here in the States such as California Roll or Spider Roll, aren't considered to be real sushi by most Japanese people. There are sushi rolls in Japan, like futomaki or kappa maki, but those are always made with seaweed on the outside, and never ever find cream cheese or avocado inside them. Plus, a lot of the times, they normally put not-as-fresh fish in the rolls since it's harder to tell the freshness of the fish in a roll. I eat these Americanized rolls occasionally and think they are tasty at times, but I don't particularly think of them as sushi either, and I never have any cravings for them either.