The Best Little Sushi Bar

I was fully an adult (and then some) when I first tried sushi. During a trip out to Las Vegas, taking my mom to see her granddaughter and meet her great-granddaughter, my daughter took us to Wayne’s Sushi and Karaoke bar. Wayne and his wife sang karaoke while creating lovely sushi for the diners in their tiny restaurant. We sat at the bar and watched Wayne, a Japanese man originally from Hawaiʻi, create his masterpieces right in front of us. The food was amazing, both beautiful and delicious, with colors and textures and tastes that were far beyond the narrative my imagination had created about eating sushi. Wayne’s running commentary was fascinating and he graciously made sushi my food-timid mother could enjoy. The who-would-eat-the-weirdest-thing competition between my partner and my daughter – something that Wayne encouraged, free of charge – was hilarious. We laughed and sang and ate sushi for hours. It was such an exquisite experience that I was totally won over to the sushi-eater column without my intention.

Over the next 12 years, anytime I traveled, I sought out the best-rated sushi restaurant in whatever town I was in. I have had sushi in San Diego, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, Portland, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Boulder, and Orlando. I have eaten sushi in small towns like Bloomington and Terre Haute, Indiana, La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. I had a strange but delicious sushi-barbeque fusion meal in Kansas City. Checking out the local sushi places became one of my travel traditions. I became an intrepid sushi explorer.

But my sushi delight was limited to visiting far-flung places. The nearest sushi restaurant was nearly three hours away from my home – a bit more of a drive than I would normally make for a meal, no matter how good, or how much I was craving it. I live in a very small midwestern town that has the unfortunate fortune to be only 20 miles from the nearest large city. We are lucky to have a selection of fast-food choices in our town. We cannot keep a decent restaurant – everyone drives the 20 miles to the next city to dine out.

So I bought sushi-making gear and hunted down recipes online. I bought sushi cookbooks. We made sushi, and although it was very good, it was also limited by the supplies I could get in this tiny town – sushi-grade fish can’t really be ordered from Amazon. But when the sushi-jonesing was threatening to make me drive three hours, homemade sushi kept me from wracking up all those miles on my old car.

All I have told you so far sets the stage for the almost miraculous thing that happened a couple of years ago in my town – not only one sushi restaurant came to town, but two, TWO of them!

Sadly, one of them was short-lived, shutting down this year during the pandemic, but Ocean Sushi has thrived. Even during quarantine people have ordered their take-out sushi in sufficient quantities to keep them going. Although I have it mostly memorized, their menu held securely to our refrigerator by strong magnets. Their phone number is in our phone contact list. Our collection of their takeout trays has filled a drawer in the kitchen. Our friends are likewise dedicated to keeping Ocean Sushi going. I see their social media posts of photos of sushi on a regular basis.

There is a solid reason for Ocean Sushi’s continued existence in a town that is predominantly a meat-and-potatoes town, a town where Chinese and Mexican buffet restaurants are the only sit-down restaurants that have historically survived, a town where Ground Round is fancy dining… their sushi is fabulous. It really, really is.

And it isn’t like I don’t have really good sushi places to compare it to – it easily holds its own against all of the sushi places I’ve tried that are in its price range. It’s a relaxed family-style establishment in a strip mall, not a fancy restaurant. Their most expensive one-person entre is $22 (a sushi and sashimi combo meal that is almost more than one person can eat). You would feel perfectly comfortable there in jeans and a t-shirt. The staff mix just the right amount of chatty talkativeness and attention with privacy so that you feel well-served, neither hovered over nor ignored. The place is clean and brightly lit, with a pleasant décor and lovely music playing at just the right volume. And best of all, it is less than five minutes from my house (although that isn’t really such a phenomenal thing in a town that is just over 20 square miles in size).

My favorite roll of theirs is the house roll – the Ocean Roll. In their list of Special Rolls, it is a lovely creation with hand-chopped spicy tuna (not minced into an unrecognizable pulp) and avocado on the inside, topped with more tuna, yellowtail, salmon, four colors of tobiko, and a yummy spicy sauce. The presentation is wonderful, even when it is stuffed into a plastic takeout tray.

I usually get their yam tempura to go along with my sushi. The crunchy batter coating is thick and buttery and pairs well with the sweetened soy sauce and spicy mayo they serve with it. When I am trying to be mindful of how many carbohydrates I’m eating, I get their Sashimi Deluxe – 16 pieces of the freshest fish, perfectly sliced and presented. The slices of sashimi are over a quarter of an inch thick and perfectly tender… not slivers cut thinly so as to hide a substandard quality fish. There’s even a hibachi bar in the back room, but I’ve never visited it because… Sushi!

And one other small note of distinction… their sliced ginger is always lovely. Not dyed pink with food coloring, the golden slices are never slimy or limp, but always crisp, with that sweet burn that makes it worth eating, even when you are stuffing yourself with sushi.

The only thing I wish they served, but don’t, are eggrolls. But if I get to craving eggrolls bad enough, I can always go across the street to the Chinese buffet and have all the delicious, handmade eggrolls I can eat for $12.99.