I was walking in the afternoon, more or less in the neighborhood, trying to keep the Black Dog at bay, when I suddenly felt an urgent need for some supermarket sushi. I don’t suppose it absolutely had to be from a supermarket. If there’d been a perfect ten-seater sushi restaurant nearby I’d probably have gone there, but I knew a Gelson’s supermarket was nearby, and that was my only reasonable hope.
In fact I’ve been eating some pretty reasonable sushi of late. This plate was at Kombu Sushi in Silverlake, and yes, some of it’s sashimi.
That’s definitely saba (Japanese mackerel) at the back – there was also Spanish mackerel on the menu and I wanted to do a compare and contrast, but they’d run out of the Spanish. I wouldn’t want to swear what the other two were – presumably yellowtail on the left, and I suppose octopus on the right - but I wouldn't put money on it. It was all pretty good though.
The last supermarket sushi I ate, put on as a treat by my hostess when I did a reading/event at Glendale Community College, a little while ago now, was actually not bad at all - note the veggies:
It appears to have come from the Nijaya market, a pretty reliable Japanese chain.
And so this afternoon, while out walking, I strolled into Gelson’s and bought a box of “Nigri assorted sushi” (not as assorted as all that, as you can see) and took it home with me. It was good enough – yellowtail and salmon, I think, though the label was very confusing. And there’s a ton of rice lurking under the fish. Obviously you don’t have to eat if all, but just as obviously you always do.
- And the Black Dog? Oh, he's never far away, sometimes it’s the walking that helps, sometimes it’s the sushi. And maybe the Sapporo helped a little too, but only a little.
