Asahi Japanese Restaurant

We’ve tried sushi restaurants from the West Coast to the East and haven’t found one that’s better than Asahi in Fayetteville.

On a recent excursion to Asahi, we sat at the sushi bar so we could ogle the raw fish behind the glass and be entertained in general by the food making process. We ordered a variety of items, choosing most of them from a colorful placard.

We started with hiyashiwakame ($4.50), a cooked marinated seaweed salad. Although it looked like a tiny pile of greens, it was tasty and surely seething with nutrients from the sea.

We stuck with an old favorite, the salmon skin inside-out roll ($3.75 for six pieces), which consists of crunchy salmon skin and scallions surrounded by rice and bound together, as sushi rolls always are, by a papery layer of seaweed. As usual, the salmon skin roll was delicious.

In addition to the salmon skin roll, I had the eel cucumber roll ($4.50), which was also very good.

We also ordered the lunch sushi/sashimi combo ($13), which consists of five pieces of sushi and six pieces of sashimi (chef’s choice) and eight California rolls.

“It was very refreshing, not too much and not too little, just the right amount so you didn’t get hungry soon after,” was the verdict.

Just to be adventurous, we ordered a few pieces of sushi by the piece. We tried white fish, surf clam, salmon and tuna (all about $2 each) and enjoyed every one of them.

We understand not all of the fish served as sushi is raw but much of it is. The definition of sushi, according to “The Master Dictionary of Food and Wine,” is “seasoned cold rice with various other ingredients.” Sashimi, on the other hand, is “sliced raw fish” served without the rice and seaweed roll.

For dessert, we sampled the fried banana with ice cream ($3.75), which is good for a change of pace.

All in all, it was a delicious meal we’d recommend to anyone with a taste for adventure.