With nonstop raving and reminiscing about the extremely unforgettable meal we had at Daiwa Sushi, Saturday morning finds us back again at the Tsukiji market.
Time: 10am
Sushi Dai: 4.5 hour wait
Daiwa Sushi: stopped accepting customers (oh, come on!!!)
Note to self: Never EVER come on a Saturday again!
Just the day before, I am amongst these crazy people standing in line for hours and hours under the hot morning sun, waiting to experience the best 20-minute meal of their lives. But today, being in panic mode, with a full list of food hunts yet to be discovered and only 24 hours left to do it, we decide to take our chances, go for a random sushi place with a shorter wait, and just hope for the best. Of course, we pick one with a significant number of people in line, just to have some sort of assurance that the food will at least be good, if not great.
We end up at Okame a couple of shops down from Daiwa Sushi. After about an hour's wait, we are escorted into, again, a tiny, narrow, resto-in-a-box. I notice that the sushi chefs in this box are not as friendly (and cute!) as the ones in Daiwa. No warm smiles, no chorus shouting enthusiastic greetings of IRASHAIMASE!!! when we enter. But, thank goodness, there is also no mean old lady who hates the camera, so I whip out my gizmo excitedly and start shooting away like a crazed paparazzo.
TRYING to control my rice intake (yeah right, whatever), I order a chirashi-sushi, a bowl of sushi rice blanketed by an assortment of sashimi. It's sort of like deconstructed sushi, where you pair pieces of sashimi with just the amount of rice you want, making it unnecessary to leave morsels of sushi rice on your plate and be given disapproving looks by the proud masters who created them. It is the right move, as I would have been thrown out of the restaurant for being guilty of leaving behind nuggets and nuggets of rice if the meal had come in the form of nigiri sushi.
The rice at Okame is no good. It is cold and hard and tasteless, like the kind you get when supermarkets finally put them on sale after a whole day of sitting in the chiller. The sashimi fares better, although still just mediocre at best. Toro tastes like regular tuna, anago is so small I cannot even taste the thing, mackerel is... well, it is mackerel, and the uni has a funky kick to it. The only thing I like from my bowl is the tamago, and only because it is sweet.
To have a fair basis of comparison with Daiwa Sushi, we order the Omakase.
Again, please do not be deceived by the pretty colors
On the whole, at ¥3,500, the Omakase did not turn out to be too bad. But knowing that with the same amount, I can get a whole lot more in terms of quality, service and atmosphere a few doors down, makes me give a boo to this place. Plus, that chirashi-sushi really killed it for me. Now I can never be BFFs with the sushi rice here.
Okame おかめ: Tsukiji Market Building 6, 5-2-1 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo. 東京都中央区築地5-2-1 築地市場6号館. +81-3-3534-5450
