With an intense craving for sushi, my wife and I decided to try the New Mart sushi place. We were quite impressed.
The 58 kwai all you can eat is just outstanding...We actually calculated that we only saved about 40 kwai by ordering all you can eat instead of a la carte. If you are a light eater, just order individual dishes. Maguro was 8 kwai for 2 pieces of nigiri sushi, as was ebi, unagi, ikura, etc. Salmon was only 6 kwai.
The fish was good, as were the other goodies. My wife, a JP national whose parents own a sushi shop in Nagoya, said that she preferred the fish here over the sushi that we ate regularly in Vancouver. There were 4 or 5 hot dishes on the menu as well.
The atmosphere was the only downside. The 6th floor of New Mart has a lot of restaurants, a few of which are of the bbq variety. I found the restaurant to be smoky as a result,and the heat also made things uncomfortable. The restaurant is a kaiten (conveyer belt) sushi bar, but the belt was not running. The furniture is plastic and not overly comfy.
Any inconveniences that were caused by the atmosphere were overidden by the good service and good food.
We will defintely make the trip again, and I would recommend any of you to give it a try.
I lived in Japan for 3 years and took to the cuisine like a fish to water, so I get sushi cravings from time to time. The Japanese like to give an honorific “O” prefix to important (honoured) aspects and things in their culture and hence you have “O-kaasan” (honourable mother) “O-yu” (honourable hot water - it makes sense when you go to a Japanese hot-springs resort) and of course there is the right honourable “O-sushi”. This pretty much sums up the way I feel about sushi.
Being back in my home town of Brighton, Britain, for a few months last year was a shock. My 15 pounds an hour English teacher wage would get me about 8-10 pieces of (Yo!) sushi, which would make me about one quarter full. And most of the sushi I ate in “Brighton-by-the-sea” did not look fresh and did not taste right. I didn’t go often.
So what’s to be had in Dalian, a city famed for its seafood throughout the land? Well, the Chinese, by and large, do not do raw fish. Maybe it’s too Japanese and would stick in a nationalist’s craw. Maybe it’s because the average Chinese still doesn’t like to stray outside of the Chinese kitchen that often. But a few do, and there are a lot of Japanese living and working here, so sushi can be hunted down. The high end Japanese restaurants in Dalian serve the real McCoy, but still and all they are aimed at Japanese businessmen so they bump up the price…why not?
It took me a while, but I think I’ve found the cheapest and most cheerful sushi place in town on the fifth floor foodcourt at NewMart. It’s welcoming, clean, does very decent sushi, and between the hours of 5 and 9 it has an “All you can eat” (tabehodai) sushi buffet for 58 yuan. There’s a wide range available, including almost all my favourites such as tuna, salmon, octopus, squid, scallop, sardine, mackerel, yellow tail, and I could go on.
That’s 4 British pounds for all the honourable raw fish you can handle and since my hourly wage here is 8 pounds, you can see that Dalian well and truly trounces Brighton on the “quality-of-living-as-measured-by-a-bellyful-of-O-sushi” benchmark.
They also do a good range of beers, hot and cold sake, and some hot food such as Japanese style eel with rice, chicken, pork, fish, and Japanese style curry rice.
It’s a great place.
That’s all for now honourable reader.
With Respect
Kim
adnan87
jim
