Shibucho is… good. Quite good. Wouldn’t chose it over Kasen in a million years. I guess they were related, like the chef from Kasen started there or something? I could be mis-remembering. If anyone cares to correct me or elaborate, please do
Wouldn’t it be helpful for a review like this to indicate the general price range with a little more specificity? “The basic omakase here will be in the region of $x for y pieces”. He says it will be “considerably cheaper than Shibucho’s L.A. counterparts” but which counterparts? Cheaper than Mori or cheaper than Sushi Sushi?
imho, i would NOT expect a review of a sushi bar to give that sort of specificity.
a review is “cast in stone” once it is filed.
the market price of fish is very volatile both wholesale and retail.
specific price information could well be out of date within a month or two.
the review, though, would be unchanged for far longer than that.
just my opinion
Hmm just looked up some of Jonathan Gold’s reviews of recent prominent LA sushi openings: he indicates price ranges at the bottom of his review of Q (Review: At Q, sushi for connoisseurs); early in his review of Sushi Tsujita (Review: Tsujita Sushi offers fish done the old-fashioned way); and in the first paragraph of his review of Zo downtown (Jonathan Gold | L.A. restaurant review: Purist <i>omakase</i> sushi at Zo).
A restaurant review in a publication like the LA Weekly is fundamentally a consumer guide: it seems very odd to me to not indicate to readers what a meal at a reviewed restaurant is likely to cost or general price ranges.
Agree the price of individual pieces of fish are volatile but the price of an omakase should be pretty stable.
Plus no restaurant goes from one general category of price/affordability to another in a volatile manner. I mean how many sushi restaurants can you name at which prices for the same kinds of meals fluctuate so wildly over time that it’s impossible to give people a pretty good sense of how much typical meals there will cost?
Indeed, the notion is hilarious though. Show up one time, and it costs you a mere sawbuck! Show up the next week and now you have to throw down multiple Benjamins! It would be an interesting social experiment I suppose.
MAO:
i’ve had that happen to me with sushi bars.
sudden changes in price that caused me to sadly reconstruct my regular rotation.
sudden reduction in variety of fish.
sudden reduction in size of portion.
not so much with other types of restaurants.