There’s a little sushi shop that’s been around for who-knows-how-long in the nearby town of Chili and it’s called Osaka Sushi.
I don’t remember exactly when I stumbled upon it, but some friends of mine took me there back toward the beginning of my junior year, and I’ve been going ever since. Around the beginning of the fall semester of 2017, they opened up a second shop in Henrietta under the same name. The place looks, feels, and serves the same way that the old Chili place did, so now I have an excuse to enlighten you all about it. Let’s talk about sushi for a bit.
The gimmick behind Osaka is that it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. That means that you pay a flat fee for being there, and you order as much of anything on their menu, at any point, as you want. Yup, for real, no strings attached. You pay your seat price, and then you can get whatever you want.
There’s a lot to pick from at Osaka. For starters, there’s a pretty great variety of sushi rolls (Philadelphia rolls, dragon rolls, spicy tuna rolls, California rolls, crispy rolls, mango rolls), hand rolls (sushi in seaweed cones), sashimi, small noodle plates, dumplings, cooked-meat skewers, and tons of individual sushi pieces (salmon, crab, shrimp, barbecue eel, egg, squid, mackerel, and white tuna, to name a few). You can even get ice cream at the end of your meal, with a choice of vanilla, chocolate, green tea, or red bean.
Osaka is a bit of a monthly routine for me and my friend group. Whenever I go, I get a very strategically picked set of plates, one that helps me get what I want while not getting too full too fast. I start with a bowl of chicken udon noodles, a Philadelphia roll, five chicken skewers, five beef skewers, and an avocado dragon roll. After digging into those, I then get an assortment of individual sushi pieces, usually three salmon pieces, three white tuna, three barbecue eel, two squid, and one shrimp. If I’m still hungry after that, I’ll try to get some fried gyoza with shrimp tempura on the side to split with friends. At the end of my whole meal, I like to top off my experience with a bowl of ice cream, served with one scoop vanilla, one scoop green tea, and one scoop red bean.
I say that this is my routine, but the truth about Osaka is that if you bring even just three people to go, your table is bound to get a platter of sushi so big you’re going to have to eat some of your friends’ sushi just to finish up the order. And you’re going to want to finish what you can, since there’s a dollar charge for each piece of sushi left uneaten when it comes time for the tab.
I’ve gone to Osaka in a group of eight before and left the place having eaten three times as much sushi as I initially planned on. It’s a fun place to eat, and the food is pretty good for the prices their asking for, especially the chicken udon.
Also, they have a fish tank at both the Chili and Henrietta locations near the entrances of the restaurants, which I find morbidly hilarious, considering it’s a sushi place. Those poor guys are watching their brethren get eaten. I wonder if fish can shed tears in water…
At Osaka, there are different prices for lunch ($13.95) and dinner ($22.95), but that’s about all you pay, aside from tips at the end.
The only real difference between the lunch and dinner menu is that the dinner menu is where sashimi and a couple other things are offered, but it’s really not worth the extra nine bucks if you ask me. Best to get there for lunch, which has nearly all the same menu items available. You can Uber there for about $10, but if you hop on the Green Line, with a bit of walking, you can get there for free. I recommend finding a friend with a car to get to this one though, as you’ll be so full after eating there that walking might be the last thing you want to do.
