Ajisai

When we come home from trips, we usually look for a "detox" dinner, something relatively clean and healthy, to recover from days of unhealthy vacation eating and hours of sitting on a plane. This usually leads us to our neighborhood sushi spot, Ajisai. Yesterday for lunch I was feeling kind of similar and was in the mood for something relatively light and healthy, so I decided to try out Ajisai's lunch special.

Ajisai has a number of lunch specials - for kitchen entrees like teriyaki, bento boxes, sushi combinations and roll combinations. Most are priced over $10, so I went with the $9.50 special for the 2 roll combo. Combining that with the current 10% Seamless discount, it kept me under $10 with tax included.  The combo came with 2 rolls plus soup and salad (a lot of places only give you one).

The miso soup was your basic miso soup - small tofu cubes, pieces of seaweed and light miso flavor. This was fine.

The salad consisted mostly of lettuce. The entire small takeout container was filled with large pieces of iceberg lettuce, plus one cucumber slice and some shredded carrots. The dressing was the usual orange ginger type of dressing you get with Japanese garden salads which I love. Not a very exciting salad and mostly lettuce, but I was kind of in the mood for something like this - light, crunchy and full of dressing.

For the two rolls, I went with the salmon/avocado and the spicy tuna. Similar to Aoki, they let you pick from an entire list of rolls, and not just something basic like tuna rolls or cucumber rolls. I appreciate that I can get "real" rolls for the price. Ajisai also let me substitute brown rice on both rolls for no extra charge. That's really rare. I don't like brown rice sushi rolls as much in texture as regular rolls, but it's so much healthier and I need that right now!

The rolls were fine. The salmon/avocado was a little bland. The spicy tuna had a good balance of mayo and tuna, and you could definitely taste the "spicy" flavor and the fish (and not mostly mayo, like some other places).

I would get this combo again, since it's a good deal and the quality is fine. I think where Ajisai shines in rolls is their special rolls (which we've never gotten around to writing about here) but their basic rolls are just fine for lunch, especially as part of the combo.