Sushi at City Vibe

Went out for cheap sushi with the wife and kid Friday night, which is always a risky venture. Cheap sushi, that is. There are actually a few places that do pretty good 99 cents a plate sushi, but not all are created equal.

We had a flyer from this place in City Vibe and decided to try it. City Vibe sounds like a buzzing entertainment district, or at least a mid- to upscale mall like VivoCity and Velocity. In fact, it is just a slightly renovated and quite ordinary neighborhood mall trying to use a new name to lure in people who would ordinarily be wary of such places. A quick trip to the toilet (the quicker the better, believe you me) proved that the facility was well below par. Any mall trying to pass for upscale should at least have clean toilets.

The sushi joint was busy, but there was never more than three parties waiting to be seated, and for most of the time we were there (about 1½ hours) there was no queue at all. And clearly they were shorthanded on bus staff and sushi makers. Bus staff should not be a problem when there is no queue, but a shortage of sushi makers could be. And that conveyor belt looked like a ghost town. When there was sushi on it it was mostly egg or tuna salad in a bean curd wrapper. Aside from a few pieces of unagi (eel), we did not see a single piece of fish roll by until a solitary salmon specimen bade us farewell.

They do allow you to order from the waiters, but our order took over 40 minutes to arrive. Shorthanded or not, how long does it take to slap a piece of fish on a rice ball?

On the positive side, we did not get sick. And we learned that we should stick to our usual 99 cent sushi place, which is pretty good, despite its location in the Inland Revenue building. That building always gives me the creeps, but at least the toilets are clean.