All-you-can-eat is a common way for restaurants to draw in new folks who might not otherwise wander in. At the heart of it, all-you-can-eats is a challenge to the customer saying, “I bet you can’t eat $XX worth of our food” that many, like myself, cannot resist.
Please note the key difference between buffet-style all-you-can-eats and restaurant-style where you order from the menu (like Sushi): the items that you order and can’t eat, you pay for. This adds considerable complexity to the challenge, especially with something like Sushi as three leftover pieces of nigiri could equal more than $10. The idea is to eat as much as possible without going over.
Noah, our friend Margo and myself attended a $17 all-you-can-eat at a Sushi Para II on Clark. I’m not here to talk about the quality of the sushi (which was exceptional) but how to properly get your money’s worth at a sushi joint based lessons learned today and in the past.
Sushi all-you-can-eat’s will likely have a special menu. This is usually a subsection of the normal menu with appetizers/soups, maki roll and nagiri sushi. You likely won’t find the more costly sushi items on this menu. Keep this in mind when going to one of these as to not be disappointed.
If you truly want to maximize your dollar value, go for the nigiri. Fish is by far the most expensive element of sushi and nigiri contains the highest ratio of fish-to-rice. This can make nigiri unfortunately expensive and is usually priced per-piece. On the other side of the sushi spectrum, maki rolls are plentiful, cheap and filling which make them more appropriate for a inexpensive sushi dinner.
I would suggest going for the expensive stuff early. That doesn’t mean an entire eel and octopus order, rather balance your menu with more of the exotic stuff plus tuna and whitefish. This tactic is simply to avoid the possibility of uneaten, expensive sushi while focusing your taste buds on the exotic stuff while still hungry.
The last and most obvious piece of advice is to make sure you eat more than the cost of your meal. At Sushi Para II the nigiri was $1-2/piece with most items leaning on the $1 side (reasonable!). This means I had to eat about 15 pieces to make it worth my $17 challenge. I ate about 20 pieces over a period of an hour with great difficulty. Noah ordered well more than I did (including appetizers), though Margo and myself had to help him out.
That’s the long and short of it. Enjoy your well planned sushi gluttony!
