The perfect chirashizushi is an elusive creature. Many restaurants do it, but very few do it the way N and I prefer – just sashimi on sushi rice. And the one that did do it the way we prefer went severely downhill in their levels of customer service that we’ve not returned since. (When the dish comes with salmon and tuna, but you run out of tuna, you replace the tuna portion with more salmon – you don’t just serve the same portion of salmon, forget about the tuna, and charge the same price. And that’s on top of getting the order wrong.).
So, N and I are back to looking for that restaurant with the consistently good kaisen don. One such place we ended up as was Sakura Japanese Kitchen.
Before we get our main of chirashizushi, we order some king fish hosomaki ($5.50 for six pieces). Baby rolls, or hosomaki, are is one of my favourite types of sushi. Each hosomaki has good bite in the fish and an addictive chewiness to the crisp seaweed. The rice is vinegared just right. I could eat many more plates of this!
Here, the chirashizushi is called a Tasmania Don ($13.00) and comes with miso soup.
I had high hopes for this chirashizushi, and perhaps they were too high. Overall, the sashimi and salad were fresh, but the sashimi slices were few (only six) and paper thin, the salad made up more than half the plate, and the rice was too vinegared to be pleasant. There’s crab meat and salmon roe in abundance, but the former was bland and the latter made the dish far too salty on top of the vinegared rice.