IT'S A FISH FOR ALL!

Welcome to Reno, the mighty mecca of all-you-can-eat sushi

- PRIYA KRISHNA

The décor may be minimal at Hinoki Sushi, but the Godzilla rolls are endless.

Inside this Reno, Nevada, restaurant on a sunny Monday afternoon, platters of sushi streamed out of the kitchen like floats in a parade, each roll drizzled with pastel-hued sauces, confettied with furikake or crowned with haystacks of imitation crab.

The Godzilla roll — a Reno special overflowing with whitefish, teriyaki sauce, hot sauce, spicy mayonnaise, green onions and sesame seeds, the whole thing deep-fried in tempura batter — graced almost every table. Diners dipped liberally into trays of ponzu, Cajun and honey-mustard sauces.

The price for this spread? US$27.99 (920 baht) per person.

At a time when food prices remain bloated, tariffs threaten supply chains and the big casino-town buffet appears endangered — Reno has a thriving ecosystem of all-you-can-eat sushi that, for now, remains relatively inexpensive.

Here in mountain-capped Reno — a kind of Las Vegas Lite, brimming with neon and a smattering of casinos, that serves as a stopover for many travellers to Lake Tahoe — nearly all of the 50 or so sushi restaurants are all-you-can-eat. Limitless sushi has become such a given that à la carte sushi restaurants rarely survive beyond a year, said Mike Higdon, a local food writer and photographer.

Born of the American sushi boom of the 1990s and the value-oriented culture of Reno, where you can still find $9.99 steak-dinner specials, all-you-can-eat sushi has become a city signature, especially as bottomless meal deals vanish elsewhere, Higdon said.

“There is a lot of pride in all-you-can-eat here,” he added. “We know that we are the mecca.”