Magic Sushi
2
204-415-7922
For years,
I drove by Magic Sushi 2 and had no clue what the restaurant’s name was. Their “all you can eat” sign dominates the
frontage where I thought All You Can Eat was actually the name.
I used to
be leery about all you can eat sushi houses since they usually come with tons
of rice and very little fish. I found
some genuinely good all you can eat places down Pembina so I have renewed
confidence to enter Magic.
The outside
of the building looks a bit dumpy but I find out that’s the nice part; the
inside looks like an absolute dump. I
love eating burgers or fish & chips at holes-in-the-wall but sushi is
supposed to be a delicate and elegant food; there’s nothing delicate or elegant
about Magic. I should get over it since
I’m here for the food and good food makes up for ambiance.
Too bad the
food here sucks.
My fears
materialise as the servings come to the table.
I own a Japanese yanagiba knife and I love using the single-bevel razor
edge to cut see-through slices of vegetables; unfortunately, they use theirs to
carve see-through slices of fish. Look
closely at the salmon and you can see the rice behind the flesh.
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As I just
said, sushi is supposed to be elegant; this teal blue plate looks plain cheap
(the chip doesn’t help). This isn’t
attractive nor appetising. I never
thought I’d miss the simple but pretty garnishes; I even miss the tawdry
plastic leaves. This presentation looks worse
than what Mel would serve out of his diner.
You can
imagine what the food tastes like—it’s rice of course. There’s so little fish in any of the rolls
that the only taste I get is rice; I can’t even taste the normally pungent
nori. I delicately pull the pieces of
fish out of the roll to sample them but alas, there isn’t enough to get a good
sense. The chopped scallop pellets are
the size of boogers and for all I know, they could taste like boogers since
there’s so little to sample and discern.
Aside from
the rice, the only thing that I can really taste is the sweetish sauce that’s
squirted on all the rolls. Being a sweet
sauce, it goes well with items like eel, Japanese mushrooms, crab or shrimp. It certainly doesn’t go with spicy salmon or
spicy tuna, yet they indiscriminately sprayed it all over everything.
Granted,
$12.95 is a great price for all you can eat but gees, the food has to taste at
least somewhere acceptable. The sushi is
an absolute write-off but at least the tempura has some redeeming
qualities. The batter tastes a tad
chewy, which means that they’ve been out of the hot oil for a bit too
long. By contrast, the shrimps came out
at just the right time. The meat tastes
moist and juicy, and they accompany (that same) sweet sauce nicely. For $5.95, this is a pretty good bargain.
Especially
in this age when Japanese restaurants sprout like shiitake mushrooms, there’s
no reason to settle for substandard sushi; Magic Sushi 2’s maki sits two levels
below substandard. My phobia about all
you can eat sushi has been robustly restored and I’m back to the adage of “you
get what you pay for.”
** /5
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