Today we went to kaiten-sushi chain Choshimaru's Oizumi-Inta restaurant (picture above) for lunch. As usual we bicycled from our home in Shakujii-Koen, and it took us 10-15 minutes. Located next to the Oizumi Interchange and with a large car park it is most easily accessible by car, and you can find a map (Japanese) below.
We arrived at 11:45 AM, and we had to sit down and wait for 10 minutes for our table, while watching other people eat (picture below).
Once we got a seat we started ordering, kaiten-sushi style, ignoring the constant loudspeaker announcements about various specials. The miso soup was free. It had been cooked using shiro-miso (sweet miso), and a mixture of vegetables and fish bones. I love miso soup with my sushi, but I prefer aka-miso (darker and less sweet than shiro-miso), and I expect a proper sushi restaurant to use juicier parts fish parts such as heads and tails which produce a "fishier" taste. What about the sushi then? The kohada I had was cut very small and the taste was dry. The salmon was great, but the price of 262 yen for one plate was a bit steep. The negitori was good, and so was the the maguro. I ended up having 6 plates, and it cost me about 1200 yen.
Choshimaru is a large, JASDAQ-listed restaurant chain with restaurants all over Kanto. And as with so many other restaurant chains the quality and taste of the food goes down while the price goes up. The fact that this restaurant was located in the same building as a convenience store and regular family restaurant speaks for itself. The best kaiten-sushi I've had was always served in small, seemingly independent restaurants where the atmosphere was a lot more relaxed and the chef (usually the owner) a friendly fellow who put his heart and soul into cutting perfect pieces of fresh fish.
Finally, I noticed that that this restaurant serves whale (picture above). Now I know that there are different opinions about whale hunting, but isn't it amazing that the meat of an animal that the Japanese government claims that it only hunts for research purposes somehow finds it way to a kaiten-sushi restaurant in Tokyo's western suburbs, where it is sold for 399 yen a plate?
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