No conveyor belts or chairs here, just excellent sushi at a fair price.
Japan’s rail network is a joy to use. Trains arrive at the exact minute they’re supposed to, carriages are clean, and stations have ample, easy-to-understand signage that makes it a snap to navigate to your necessary transfer or desired exit.
But there’s a special kind of joy waiting for you if you’re passing through Akabane Station in Tokyo, which has an outstanding, speedy, and affordable sushi restaurant inside its ticket gates.
Standing Sushi Bar Yasuke is managed by Choshimaru, whose primary business is a chain of roughly 100 conveyor belt sushi restaurants in east Japan. Because of that, and also the time-is-of-the-essence nature of train station dining, you might expect Yasuke to be a conveyor belt joint too, but it’s actually a traditional sushi bar, with staff behind the counter making your pieces to order.
Prices start at 97 yen (US$0.65) per piece, which is a great deal for non-conveyor belt sushi, so great that we weren’t about to pass up the chance to get some for ourselves.
With no chairs, the interior actually felt more spacious than the restaurant’s modest amount of floor space would otherwise have you expecting. You place your order through a tablet, and we especially liked the clever design of the soy sauce dish, which allows it to do double duty as a chopstick rest.
▼ You also use the tablet to ask for green tea, wasabi, and ginger, which are all free.
Yasuke offers a trio of omakse-style lunchtime sushi sets, ranging from 880 to 1,4330 yen and coming with a bowl of miso soup.
However, rather than leave the selection up to the chef to decide on, we wanted to pick our own kinds of fish, and we started with four pieces from the middle of the menu’s per-piece price range.
● Squid (121 yen)
● Engawa/flounder fin (176 yen)
● Warayaki buri/straw-seared yellowtail (231 yen)
● Aji/horse mackerel (176 yen)
Don’t underestimate the quality of the fish or the presentation on account of this being a standing sushi bar, because they’re were excellent across the board, with the warayaki buri particularly rich and flavorful.
Of course, now that we’d tried some of Yasuke’s mid-tier offerings, next we needed to check the quality of their even more budget-friendly kinds of sushi, so after a few more taps on the ordering tablet we had a second plate in front of us.
● Egg (97 yen)
● Squid tentacles with ginger (97 yen)
● Bay scallop (97 yen)
● Boiled shirasu/whitebait (97 yen)
And for the sake of proper taste-testing, naturally we also needed to explore the other end of the spectrum, with a plate of more premium pieces (though they’re still within the bounds of affordable luxuries).
● Kanpachi/amberjack (231 yen)
● Akagai/ark shell Egg (231 yen)
● Otoro/extra fatty tuna (396 yen)
Once again, there was no room for complaint regarding the flavor, texture, or presentation of any of them, though out of the bunch, we have to heap the most praise on the otoro, which was delectably marbled and every bit as delicious as it looked.
Akabane is a bit outside the center of downtown Tokyo, but with five train lines all running through the station, there’s a chance you’ll need to make use of it if you’re headed to sightseeing destinations in the northern part of the city or other prefectures in that direction from the city, and if you find your sushi cravings hitting en route, now you know where to satisfy them.
Restaurant information
Standing Sushi Bar Yasuke (E-cute Akabane Minami branch) / Standing 鮨 Bar Yasuke（エキュート赤羽みなみ店）
Address: Tokyo-to, Kita-ku, Akabane 1-1-1 (inside JR Akabane Station ticket gates)
東京都北区赤羽1-1-1（JR赤羽駅改札内）
Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
Photos © SoraNews24
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