Las Vegas Entertainment Blogs

“Sushi” and “Buffet” Will Never Be Friends…

Las Vegas, Nevada, Restaurants, Sin City
Posted October 7th, 2007 by Christopher - 4 comments

I love sushi. I’ve loved it for years. I’m not a sushi “snob” per se but I’m definitely not a sushi novice or the type of person that only eats a few things. I love sea urchin (uni.) I love sweet shrimp. I love Spanish mackerel. When I eat sweet shrimp (amaebi) or Spanish mackerel (aji), my regular sushi chefs – BJ and Bruce at Sushi Avenue – don’t even need to ask if I want the shrimp heads or mackerel bones deep fried and served with the sushi… That’s just the way it was meant to be eaten! I like all the stuff most people think is weird. In fact, the only sushi bar item that I don’t like is monkfish liver (ankimo.) That’s just no good on account of how it’s liver and all, but some people love it, particularly some Asian folk.

Over the years I’ve tried a number of sushi buffets and all-you-can-eat types of places. I always end up asking myself “why?” I’d honestly rather pay twice as much money for half as much sushi of good quality than wish I hadn’t bothered with the stuff you typically find on these types of restaurants’ serving lines. [Note: There is one notable exception to this rule I have experienced in Brian's Beach, which is a small all-you-can-eat sushi place off of West Flamingo that makes whatever you want when you order it, keeping the freshness levels higher than most of its competitors.]

Years back, when I first started coming to Las Vegas regularly, a flight attendant on Southwest was talking to me on the flight out – just raving about this buffet sushi place in Vegas that was the best she had ever had. She told me it was on Decatur near Flamingo – a place called Makino. I couldn’t resist her story about this holy grail of raw fish so my girlfriend and I checked it out. One of two things were true about that girl: either she’d only had very limited experience with sushi in general or she was on some sort of kickback program for sending Southwest Airlines customers to the place. It was anything but great. It wasn’t old fish or anything like that – it just wasn’t very good sushi. It was the standard sushi buffet type of place with huge blocks of rice under thinly sliced pieces of so-so fish, accompanied by the usual inexplicably pan-Asian, cheap to produce, filler, B-list seafood items that no one is ever really excited about eating but thinks “I guess I’ll try one of these” as they sheepishly put one, no, two on their plate. I never went back.

I hadn’t been south on Eastern from the 215 since they finished a couple of new retail centers recently. It seems like they were just building them, but as I cruised that way the other night with a couple of friends, I saw that not only were they finished, they were full of new businesses. On one corner was a brightly and colorfully lit new restaurant was a shiny new sign that read “Makino.” It could only have been the way the place was lit up… I was drawn to it like a moth. Okay, granted, we were hungry and the three of us are sushi addicts. I remembered my last experience from the other Makino several many years back and so I had Liz run inside to do some recon on the buffet spread to see how it looked and also what the price was, just in case they had lost their minds or were trying to pay for the new joint in a hurry. I remembered that it was around $25 per person and when Liz came scurrying back to the car with a smile I was feeling a little better about the place already. As it turned out it was $23.95 and she said it looked “pretty good.”

We tried their miso soup to start. It was really vegetable-y. Different, but pretty good and interesting for a change. We got down to business with the sushi next. I guess I should give you the bad news first: buffet sushi is still buffet sushi. Big shocker, right? I’ll say this, though – the rice blocks were less big than the original Makino. They had large trays of sashimi, in the most common varieties of fish, of course. I had some pretty decent tuna. What can I say?

Then there are those pesky B-list seafood items… The only reason I am bothering to write and publish this review is because of the sushi buffet’s seafood co-stars! For once in my lifetime of dining out the supporting actresses of the buffet serving line stole the show! Hell has apparently frozen over… The chefs at Makino prepared several types of raw seafood salads with squid and octopus that were really tasty, not filled with, uhm, filler, and not overly coated with some weird or sweet sauce that gets in the way of the fish. There was a hot section on the buffet, as well, with a good yakitori item, grilled Escolar (superwhite/ono) steaks, and a number of other yummy-looking things I didn’t get around to trying because of my diet and aversion to sauces. There was a noodle bowl prep station and last but not least, a dessert section that actually looked like desserts you would want to eat! (I know that you know that I am speaking the truth about that Asian buffet dessert situation… something really has to be done!) The dessert buffet area was led by a five-layered fountain of liquid chocolate complete with bananas and strawberries on sticks for your dipping pleasure. Nice touch.

I really enjoyed the way the owners and designers used lots of lighting and color in the place. It was a fun little meal with a couple of my best friends in the world. Since you can’t seem to hardly even get a decent cheeseburger with fries and a drink for less than $20 in this town anymore, $23.95 for this meal seems like a bargain. It’s off-Strip but a short drive and might be a nice, reasonably priced change of pace to your over-Strip’ed vacation.

Tags: food, Restaurants, reviews, seafood, sushi

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