Sushi Dai – Japan
Yes, this Tokyo restaurant serves the world's best sushi – either for the price, or overall
The lines start forming outside of Tokyo’s Toyosu Fish Market a little before 3:00am, on an anonymous skybridge that leads to a door and then another door. Should you not read Japanese and the translation feature of your phone isn’t working, you may miss the sign – posted between two red cones – addressed to “the general public” that you “will not be able to pass through the pedestrian deck. (It is a dead end.)” Except it’s not a dead end. By 4:00am, there will be a line of perhaps a dozen people waiting to be let into this building at 5:00am. And at 5:30am, if they were in the first group of those waiting, they will be allowed to enter Sushi Dai – a restaurant that has existed here for only a handful of years, but was attracting lines at Japan’s even more famous Tsukiji Fish Market (which has since closed) decades earlier. It is, by some measures, the best sushi restaurant in the world, or at a minimum, the best value.
Sushi Dai offers a la carte sushi by the piece or a 10-course omakase tasting menu where you trust the chef. The omakase menu is and always has been incredibly affordable, which is only half-surprising given that you are consuming superb quality fish directly from the adjacent market where it is aggregated and shipped across Japan and the world, as selected every day by a chef who has had access to that market for decades. At current exchange rates, it costs $36. So the default is to order it unless you have a significant dietary limitation or broader trust issues.
After 10 pieces of sushi, plus included (delicious) miso soup, and sweet tamago egg omelet, you may still be hungry, at which point the a la carte menu and chef’s recommendations will come in handy. If there are giant scallops, get them. Try atypical clams, whatever tuna interests you, and some Spanish mackerel if it wasn’t in your omakase. Hell, try anything. If it’s here, it’s great.
Unless you have already eaten at a comparably phenomenal sushi restaurant – and if you don’t know whether you have, you probably haven’t – the experience will be brain-altering. Every piece of fish, ultra fresh and generously portioned, paired with perfectly flavored and temperature balanced (warm) sushi rice, everything pre-seasoned to perfection. Between protein and carb, pieces will melt in your mouth, and you will wonder why every piece of sushi you’ve had before was not like these. If you’re like us, you will spend many subsequent meals over many years contemplating and reaching conclusions on this point.
It should be noted that Sushi Dai had a direct rival at Tsukiji Market, Daiwa Sushi, which has also moved over to Toyosu in a not particularly close building. To the extent that there was any question as to which place at Tsukiji was better, or how close they were to one another in quality, they have been definitively resolved in Sushi Dai’s favor, by a wide margin. In our experience, there was no longer a line at Daiwa, and when we got inside, the omakase was better than most U.S. sushi places, but not thrilling. That there’s a wide gulf between “better than most U.S. sushi places” and Sushi Dai should be all the recommendation you need to experience this at least once in your life.