Sushi Yoko

A few weeks ago, a craving for Japanese food struck. Our normal place, Sushi Mio, is pretty far from the house and I wanted to try something closer. In the past, we've heard a lot of good things about Sushi Yoko (off P'tree Industrial at Winter's Chapel), so after some initial research, we decided to go.

Our first visit was mediocre, but we could certainly see how to improve our second visit. We were incredibly impressed by the huge menu of Japanese offerings. We took the fact that we didn't recognize most of the menu as a great sign of authentic traditional fare. The service was also only okay, but we had been conservative with our ordering and needed to order a second round, so we took is as mostly our own hesitation.

After a long grueling week at work, both J and I were in need of a nice break and so we headed up to Sushi Yoko.

This time, keeping in mind that it's best to order all at once and that one must request a sushi menu, we took care in reading over the menu and also recalling the smaller portions of each dish.

J ordered the oshinko, tako su, a spicy tuna roll, and the katsu don, one of his favorites. The oshinko was a selection of four pickled items. Although they were all lightly pickled, I was not that foud of them, so I left them all for him to eat. The tako su is a, octopus + seaweed salad with a light vinegar sauce. It's very good, but I'm surprised that J likes it. The spicy tuna rolls at Sushi Yoko are made with wasabi, so they are too spicy for me, but J loves them. And the katsu don was a delicious moist bowl of sliced pork cutlet and egg. Normally when you order this dish, it's dry and kind of boring, but this was warm and comforting.

For me, I ordered the soft shell crab tempura, hamachi ni, sake sashimi, buta kakuni and a tuna roll.

The soft shell crab tempura was good. They cut off the legs so that you only receive the body and this was a very sizable offering. The hamachi ni is a steak of yellowtail that's simmered in soy sauce. The first few bites were total heaven. The luxuriousness of the yellowtail was perfect. This will certainly become one of my regular items. The sake sashimi was good, though the frugal part of me wishes that I received slightly more fish than I had received for $9.25. The buta kakuni is braised pork belly in a sweet soy mixture and is served with some steamed spinach (I think) and a boiled egg. I found the entire dish to be a little too heavy for me, and the contrast with the hamachi ni was not good since the buta kakuni overrode almost all other flavors. The tuna roll was good, though they also put wasabi into their rolls, and some of the pieces were a little too strong for me. I've already planned in my head that Sushi Yoko is not the place for me to order sushi, but I'll probably have to start lamely ordering without wasabi to keep my meal balanced.

The last thing that I liked about our visit is that I ordered hot tea and was given my own little personal pot. I drink a lot of tea at a Japanese meal (whereas I don't drink tea while eating Chinese food, only before and after), and the last time we were there, I found some difficulty in getting my cup refilled.

Since Sushi Yoko's menu is available online, I'll probably start planning what I'm going to order the next time we go!

Last week, I went to lunch at Happy Sumo which is located near the office in Dunwoody. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had a discounted sushi menu for lunch and also that the nigiri had super long pieces of very fresh fish on them that extended about an inch off the rice. I will certainly have to add this place to my list of lunch places.