Sushileecious

Sushileecious is a sushi restaurant in Wiesbaden, situated just next to the museum and less than five minutes away on foot from the train station, Wiesbaden Hauptbahnhof.

In Wiesbaden in general, there are quite a number of Asian restaurants and, at the majority of them, you can find sushi, as well as grills, woks and other typical Asian dishes. But, sadly, it can't be said that they are all amazing places to dine at...

I came across Sushileecious by chance one morning when I had to go to the doctor because I had a 40ºC fever and the restaurant was situated right next to the doctor's surgery. (For those of you who are interested in finding out how I ended up with a 40ºC fever, you can read the article that I wrote about it here. )

The restaurant's exterior is quite eye-catching. The entranceway is open and it seems more like you are about to walk into a hotel than a sushi restaurant.

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Well, having an entranceway that is as striking as this, I guess that it was to be expected that I would end up dining at this restaurant.

Ever since I arrived in Wiesbaden, I had been wanting to eat some sushi really badly. However, after seeing Okinni (a sushi and Asian grill restaurant situated just in front of my office), I didn't really feel like it as much because the food was all so expensive and, having heard what people had said on Tripadvisor about it, it didn't really seem like it was worth going to.

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Okinni offered an "all you can eat" buffet for 24€ at lunchtime and for 30€ at dinner, during public holidays or at weekends. That's a lot of money, let's not lie. And, besides, in the all you can eat menu, there were hardly any nigiris on offer and then the vast majority of the other sushi were vegetable-based. In other words, there were no salmon or tuna sushi, just avocado or crab substitute (the crab sticks that are usually put in salads). But, honestly, it just seemed like a total scam to me.

If you are going to pay almost 30€, the least you would expect is for there to be some nigiris on offer, as well as the other types of sushi like makis or salmon California rolls... come on!

Compared with Okinii, Sushileecious was much, much cheaper and had quite an acceptable variety of nigiris available.

As a restaurant, Sushileecious specialises in buffets, although you would prefer to choose other items from the menu, you can do so too.

The prices for the buffet were as follows:

• Monday to Friday, from 11:30am to 2:30pm: 13. 80€
• Monday to Friday, from 6pm to 10pm: 19. 80€
• Saturday, Sunday and public holidays: 19. 80€

However, for students, the price changes. To receive this discount, it's sufficient enough for you to show some identification that proves that you are a student (like a university ID card), and the price will drop to 12. 80€ for the midday buffet and 17. 80€ for the evening, weekend and public holiday buffets, respectively.

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But this price is cheating people. If you are going to choose the buffet option, it's obligatory to order a drink (which doesn't form part of the cost of the buffet), and depending on what you order, the final price will end up being equal to or higher than the normal price charged without student discount.

The time that I went to to Sushileecious, I went with a friend and it just so happened that we had forgotten our student ID cards. I honestly didn't know about the discounted price before going there because, if I remember correctly, it wasn't written on the sign outside and, to tell the truth, I couldn't be bothered to look for the prices online either.

Even still, we were ridiculously lucky because one of the waiters who was looking after us was Spanish, and he was so excited to see some compatriots that he gave us the discount despite not having our ID cards - it was pretty obvious that we were students. I told him that I was in Wiesbaden doing an internship before finishing my degree, and my American friend had come to visit me, but she was studying for her Masters degree in Madrid.

He was really friendly and I really appreciated this kind gesture he made because I was already quite tired of and depressed by the cold and unfriendly personalities of the German population.

We were sat at a table close to the buffet (which we could go up to whenever we wanted to), but we weren't too close that we didn't have any privacy whilst eating.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a huge variety of nigiris: salmon, tuna, octopus, butterfish, and prawn, amongst a few others. There are also uramaki rolls, California rolls, and makis.

The first photo that I will leave for you below now is one of the lunchtime buffet. The second, however, is the buffet served in the evenings, at weekends and on public holidays.

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As you can see, the difference in the variety is obvious, and this is where the explanation for the price rise between lunch and dinnertime comes from.

When we visited Sushileecious, we went at midday because we already had other plans for dinner, but we were really up for eating some sushi and my friend couldn't stay for very long either.

And, to tell you the truth, it disappointed me a little bit.

Look, you have to understand that going to a reasonably priced sushi buffet means that the quality of the food isn't going to be the best. For a buffet, though, the sushi served at Sushileecious wasn't at all bad.

But when I say that it disappointed me, it was because the restaurant looked really good and seemed quite promising.

It was enough to just see the entrance to make you excited to go in and dine there for a while.

I think that I was more disappointed than anything else because my expectations were too high (something that I should work on changing).

Sadly, this is the case for the majority of sushi restaurants that offer buffets. I have had the chance to eat in two of the best sushi restaurants that I had never dined at before, so the standard that I hold places to is quite high.

I have eaten buffet sushi as well as sushi ordered from a menu, in both expensive buffets and cheaper ones, so I know what I am talking about when I say that I have found the best sushi buffet ever.

One of them is Tokyo in Amiens, and another is Sumo in Madrid.

At best, the quality of the evening and weekend buffet changes a little bit, as well as the variety of sushi offered, but I will never know that for myself because I didn't go back to this restaurant.

This happens to me quite often... when I get bad feelings about something, it is very difficult for me to change my opinion, and, generally, I don't go back to that place again (even if I was to eat something different).

Aside from the sushi, there are other hot dishes on the other side of the buffet table, like: meat skewers with terayaki sauce, sauteed vegetables, lemon chicken, as well as other meat-based dishes. Unfortunately, there were no gyozas on offer, which seems like a huge error on the restaurant's part because any self-respecting sushi restaurant should have gyozas available as part of their buffet menu.

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In short, as well as the selection of sushi and hot dishes available as part of the buffet, you can also order items from the à la carte menu. This when the quality of the food changes.

It's something very typical in sushi buffets (as far as I am aware) that the quality of the food is mid-to-low compared to the other items available to order on the restaurant's à la carte menu, which are usually of incredibly good quality. Obviously, the prices of these aforementioned menu items are normally higher.

I think that it's for this reason that the buffet at the restaurant, Tokyo, in Amiens was much better than that of Sushileecious, as Tokyo is a restaurant that specialises in buffets. All of its menu is just for buffet-style service, although it's true that there are still a couple of dishes that are expensive, like the fish and crab nigiris, which, to my understanding, are separated from the rest of the sushi and are charged at a higher price.

However, with regards to the restaurants that offer buffets as an addition to their menu, the quality does tend to be low.

But, anyway, I guess it doesn't matter. The most important thing was that I got full just from eating salmon and tuna nigiris, which are my absolute favourites (although they weren't very good at Sushileecious).

As I said at the beginning of this post, the purchase of a drink is compulsory in order to take advantage of this buffet menu, and the prices of soft drinks are around 3€.

In addition to the typical array of soft drinks and juices, this restaurant also serves Japanese beer and sake, and another type of Japanese liquor, although I cannot remember what it is called. The prices of these Japanese drinks is a little bit expensive: around 5€ for a little bottle of beer, and up to 8€ for a small glass of sake.

Now, let's move on to talk a little bit more about the atmosphere, the decor and the service at this restaurant.

The restaurant is very well-decorated, and by that I mean that you can see that they have worked quite well at it.

There is a total of 3 rooms, all of which are very spacious. The first room is where the main sushi table, hot plate stand and the bar are. In addition to this, there are a few tables surrounding these and that was where they seated us.

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The second room is much more spacious, as there are just tables for you to sit at occupying this room. Normally, the waiter passes by with trays or little carts of sushi so that the customers don't have to keep getting up constantly to get the food that they want to eat.

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And, finally, this is the third room, although I had no idea what this room was for until we left the restaurant. We turned around to look behind us and we saw it from the windows.

It seems like an incredible space and I really, really regret not having known of its existence until I left.

I don't know how to explain it, but you can see it for yourselves in the photo.

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Normally, as I mentioned in my post about the restaurant, Nigiri, the Japanese usually sit kneeling up when it comes to eating their meals, due to the fact that the tables are very low to the ground.

However, as us Western people have very stiff joints and the majority aren't capable of using their legs to bear their own body weight for more than two minutes, they invented this very peculiar thing to solve the problem. Basically, it is a hole in the ground that you can put your legs in, which allows you to sit down more comfortably whilst maintaining this traditional "Japanese style".

It seems like a great idea (Hattoti Hanzõ in Madrid also has it), although it does take away a bit of the appeal of kneeling up to sit down.

All of the restaurant is decorated as if it was made entirely out of bamboo, or that was at least the notion that it gave me when I saw it for the first time upon entering the restaurant.

Besides the tables with the space for your legs that I have just told you all about, there are also canvases and photographs of geishas and samurais around the entire restaurant. One of these photographs actually gave me the idea for the design of my wedding dress because it seemed absolutely amazing to me, and the Japanese style drives me crazy as it is.

With regards to the service given by the waiting staff - it was honestly amazing. I am not just saying that because of the Spanish waiter, but for the staff as a whole; all of them were very friendly and always had a smile on their face when they came over to talk to you.

I also have to mention that they speak really good English, so if you end up going to the restaurant and you don't know German, don't worry about it at all!

Well, there's not much left to say really other than if you don't feel like cooking one day and you fancy stuffing yourself with sushi for a decent price, I really recommend that you take a trip to Sushileecious.