What’s The Best Lunchtime Sushi?

LUNCHTIME sushi can be a heavenly, taste-buds-in-ecstasy culinary experience, or – far too often - a horrible, bland let-down you want to purge from memory. 

Of course, sushi is a super-healthy midday meal; high in protein and low in calories.  But if you are like me, a lover of sushi for itself, you buy it for the taste and let the flavours take you right back to Tokyo.

With a tight budget (£5-7 per day), I’m buying from kaiten (rotator belt) sushi restaurants with more than one location in the city centre as well as a couple of high street cafes.

I’m looking for the best lunchtime sushi deals in Manchester, judging on quality and price.  This is just what I’ve been waiting for - an excuse to eat sushi for lunch every day for a week.  Besides, I feel a need to pin this down once and for all.

With a tight budget (£5-7 per day), I’m buying from kaiten (rotator belt) sushi restaurants with more than one location in the city centre as well as a couple of high street cafes.  Each place is takeaway friendly and, whenever possible, I’ll opt for their lunch deal. 

I’m skipping most major supermarket chains, where the sushi is so awful that you couldn’t give it away on the streets of Japan. Sushi in these places is treated as an afterthought and a quirky alternative to the almighty sandwich. I cringe when I think that people purchase these rubbery grey pellets and think that it’s sushi. It definitely is not. 

YO! Sushi

The most vibrant of the kaiten counters in town, the name itself is a call for attention.  So, how could I help choosing ‘YO!’ for my first sushi lunch?

For £5 I got a pre-made Fish Roll Box, which included six pieces of maki (rolled sushi); three rolls of tuna with avocado and three California (artificial crab) roll pieces. 

Opening the box, there was no fragrant smell and overall it all felt a bit sterile.  I’m only guessing that’s because they sit so long in the cold storage waiting to be bought. However, both rolls struck just the right balance of sweet, sour, and salty flavours. The rice was soft and not rolled too tightly. 

YO! Sushi

The tobiko (small orange fish eggs) that seasoned the outside of the tuna maki added a bit of tang and blended very well with the tuna, avocado, and mayonnaise sauce. I preferred these to the California rolls, which admittedly have never been my favourite.

Six pieces is not a massive amount of sushi and I was still a tad hungry afterward, but all in all it was a really good lunch for £5.

Samsi

This kaiten counter came so highly recommended by a colleague, I couldn’t wait to get over and sample what I was sure would be the out and out winner in my week of tastings. 

Takeaway customers order at the counter (at the Spinningfields location, at least) and choose three conveyor belt items for their takeaway deal. 

I felt quite special as I slid onto a seat in front of the chef, who told me he would drop what he was doing to make me the “chef’s special”.  For £4.95 I got six slices of maki and at Samsi a can of Diet Coke is thrown in. 

Samsi

Opening the sushi, however, I couldn’t believe this was the chef’s special. The ingredients were hard to really taste, because they were minute. The salmon, prawn, and cucumber roll promised by the chef was really mostly rice.

When I extracted the thin slice of salmon, I felt as though I was playing a game of Operation and the nibblet of prawn I pulled out next was so small I could balance it on the end of my chopstick.  

Fighting an impulse to walk back to Samsi and demand my money back, I loaded up on wasabi and soy sauce to give my (mostly) rice rolls some flavour. 

It was an incredibly disappointing experience, since this was supposed to be my big winner. On a positive note, the takeaway lunch I got at Samsi did fill me up.  Perhaps it all that rice and fizzy Diet Coke.

Marks & Spencer

The Asian Bento box has a nice presentation.  For just under £5 you get four maki pieces, one salmon and one prawn nigiri, prawns on rice with sesame seeds, and a handful of edamame (soy beans). 

The salmon and prawn nigiri were of good quality, though not quite as flavourful as YO! Sushi.  But where M&S failed was their rice. It was hard and the maki were rolled so tightly you could practically hear little cries and gasping for breath. 

M&S

What’s more, my usual coping strategy of wasabi and soy sauce failed here. The wasabi they are using has no kick. It was weak and bland horseradish. I was leaning towards a four, but this dropped them down to a three.   

M&S food is meant to be up-market compared to your average supermarket products, but in the case of their Asian Bento, they fail to distinguish themselves.  It’s a step sideways from Tesco, so don’t be fooled by the fancy presentation.

Yuzu

Located in Chinatown, Yuzu is a small Japanese restaurant that convinced me to alter the parameters in my little experiment.  First of all, there’s no sushi on the menu, but it does have the sushi ingredients in the form of sashimi on rice, which on their menu reads ‘organic salmon don’.  It comes with miso soup and costs £7.95. 

I waited about five minutes for my meal to be made, which gave me time to soak in the atmosphere of the small, homely restaurant.  There was a feeling of softness here, which rings truer of the Japan I know than sushi restaurants which capitalise on Tokyo’s reputation for a wild lifestyle and frenetic pace.

Back at the office, I opened my takeaway to find a beautiful lunch.  It was simple and elegant. The sashimi was flawless, sliced perfectly right and had a delicate but distinct salmon flavour. There is no need for creamy sauces because the fish speaks for itself.

Yuzu

The rice is high-quality Japanese rice, incredibly fragrant, and it’s a bit clingy but not sticky. Shredded daikon was a garnish as well, which was fresh, crispy and had that lovely zing.

My Yuzu lunch made me homesick for Tokyo, and it was the only restaurant to which I swore I would return for dinner.   

Have I compromised my experiment?  I think not.  I’m still getting the health benefits of eating sushi and what’s more, I have found a wonderful lunch option.

Pret A Manger

‘Our authentic Japanese sushi is prepared one by one by our sushi experts,’ reads the label on the package. ‘Their meticulous attention to every detail is inspiring.’

With such a lofty description, I should be getting world-class sushi, right? 

But notice they say ‘expert’ and not ‘chef’. Traditionally, one would need to train for a decade to be considered a chef in Japan. Now there are sushi-making training courses for foreigners that take less than three months. I wonder how long these ‘experts’ trained?

Pret A Manger

The £4.99 Salmon and Prawn Sushi Box came with salmon nigiri and salmon and tuna maki, prawn nigiri and prawn maki.

I have to give Pret credit for thick, nicely flavoured salmon. And, surprisingly, the nicest of all the ginger I’d had all week. 

But their downfall, just like M&S is their rice. It’s hard. And the nori is bland and empty; it doesn’t have that ‘just plucked from the sea’ taste or smell. 

The only thing I’m inspired to do is buy a Pret Latte and forget the whole thing.

Wasabi

This kaiten-zushi restaurant was jam-packed and customers sat shoulder to shoulder with servers and chefs flying around in a rush. There was hardly a seat at the bar, so it was a good thing I was taking my food with me.  

Advertised outside is a £5.50 lunch deal, which includes miso soup. But as I found out, the restaurant is not willing to let you have the same deal as a takeaway order. This causes me to suspect it’s a way to get people in the door, figuring that when the sushi is tantalisingly paraded in front of them, they will capitulate and order more.

I stayed firm and ordered the smallest takeaway deal - five plates for £7.  In a rush, I had to hurriedly point to what I wanted off a laminated card with 24 choices and no descriptions. 

Five minutes later, I exited with my lunch. I was astounded, and a little frightened, when I opened the box.  The monstrous rolls were a mix of bright colours and boldness. 

Wasabi

I had ordered Wasabi’s version of the California roll, which was made with salmon rather than artificial crab as it usually is. It was twice the size of the one from YO! Sushi and so packed with ingredients I grinned just looking at it. I wouldn’t go away hungry from this meal. 

The eel nigiri were a tad overly salty and saucy.  The spicy tuna roll was blazing hot in that cayenne pepper way.  Not refined, but fiery like tex-mex.  It was… different.

Everything about the meal was, in a word, LOUD.

But I had no problems with hard rice here. If anything, the rice was a bit too mushy. And the salmon is the softest I’ve had anywhere yet.  My teeth bit through it with virtually no effort. 

Besides, it was massive for £7. I was stuffed. I think the Wasabi dishes are very specific to taste, and it would take another visit or two to really find the ones that I like. 

Verdict:

The long and short of it is: go to a sushi restaurant for your sushi. The sandwich-heavy cafes aren’t worth the bother. 

YO! Sushi had the best maki, without question.  It was also the quickest.

For the best value for money, I recommend Wasabi, although you shouldn’t define your sushi too narrowly there as you are bound to find originality.  

For the most authentic Japanese flavours, the winner is far and away Yuzu, which was the only restaurant that made me think of Japan, of the people I knew there, and the restaurants in which we ate.  

I would recommend any of these three places and in the meantime, I’ll be scouting out others.  But for now – I never thought I’d say this – I think I’ve had enough sushi.