Restaurant Review: Ebisu Sushi in Kobe

You’re never gonna believe this, but we haven’t been out to eat much lately. In the past… 18 months or so we’ve mostly been eating at home. However, now that Eriko is fully vaxxed and I’ve had shot one, we decided it was time to treat ourselves to an anniversary lunch, so we went to one of the best places in Kobe, which also happens to be incredibly budget-friendly: Ebisu Sushi.

Ebisu is a small chain with a number of locations in the area. We’d often gotten their bento lunch before, which is better than most packaged sushi you’re likely to find, but had only eaten in the restaurant once a few years ago. Since it was our anniversary, we decided to brave the outside world and dine in. There was no wait, so we quickly sat and were given some green tea and the menus:

Sadly, the menus were in Japanese, and some of them were in complicated Japanese that I couldn’t read, so I relied heavily on the pictures on the wall, which in the case of this restaurant was fine because the best stuff is advertised on the wall. It’s not uncommon for a restaurant like this to have a million pieces of paper stuck up like this; don’t ask me why but it’s normal. The way you order is by writing down your desires on the clipboard they give you and handing it to your server. The sushi came out VERY fast, so fast I dare say they’ve got an X-men guy working back there.

Eriko got a couple decadent piles of fish, one with tuna and the other with octopus, salmon and whatever else was in there. She also got some unagi (freshwater eel) that she said was “oishii” (delicious).

As for my order, the salmon was absolutely delicious, much better prepared fresh than in the lunchboxes we sometimes get. Great fish, perfect proportion, exquisite.

The maguro (tuna) sampler had three pieces: the one on the right with the yellow stuff was a bit thick, requiring as much chewing as a big piece of beef. The one on the left absolutely melted in my mouth, super tasty. But the real star of the show was the guy in the middle, which had an oba leaf on top. The tuna was silky and buttery, and the leaf added extra flavor without detracting from the sushi. Incredible.

I am a sucker for unagi, and the unagi sampler was great. As you can see, they all had different levels of sauce and wasabi, but all were just the right thickness, creamy and velvety and I’m running out of gross food adjectives but the point is it was absolutely fantastic.

Four minutes later:

We were able to pay with a credit card (not a given in Japanese restaurants), and the waiter quickly tabulated our damage: 2,130 yen. That’s TWENTY DOLLARS. Same price as a bento lunch. For some of the best sushi I’ve had in years. “We’re coming here every week,” I said to my wife as we left, and I meant it. I had forgotten how great the sushi here was, and I really don’t understand how it is so cheap. If you ever find yourself near an Ebisu Sushi, go there and eat that stuff because it is goooooooooooooooooood.