Sometimes there are sushi restaurants that try to be creative and trendy, but run into obvious financial limitations of location. Sushi A Go-Go is an example of one such restaurant, with some interesting and new roll ideas but mediocre fish and high prices. This is the kind of place I’ll go to once to try a couple of odd rolls, but then will avoid in order to keep my wallet intact.
Sushi A Go-Go, 1900 Broadway, New York, NY
Sushi A Go-Go, 1900 Broadway, New York, NY (212) 724-7340
Experience: 13
Food: 15
Bill: 14
Quality: 7
Creativity: 7
Flavor: 6
Service: 6
Total: 68
EXPERIENCE: I once ate at Sushi A Go-Go all the time. Well, not in the restaurant. Back when I worked for the Metropolitan opera, I would get A Go-Go to go all the time, because they have a decent lunch box there. When you’re hanging out in the Lincoln Center area, though, anything under $12 should be considered a deal. This time, I decided to eat at the restaurant itself. Sushi A Go-GO is a very small sushi bar that is often full of people to the point that I was almost elbow to elbow on the weekday that I visited. Many of the people around me were ordering tuna sashimi salads and teriyaki lunches, so I didn’t have an idea of what sushi the restaurant offered from looking around. The colorful, fancy style of the restaurant interior made me think of variety and creativity, of fruit and candy flavors waiting for me behind the sushi bar. I sat down in the crowded restaurant and was eventually approached by a waitress who had been running all over the restaurant trying to keep her job and didn’t seem to want to be there at all. She didn’t have answers for me about the menu, which is overpriced enough that even deluxe rolls seem reasonable, but the lunch box with two rolls, a salad, and some edamame was $10 and affored a decent selection of the restaurant’s more interesting roll possibilities. The waitress did tell me they have real crab, so I ordered the Red Dragon roll and the Crazy Crab roll, which featured Alaskan snow crab, wasabi tobiko (green smelt-roe), and a spicy sauce. I also ordered an ala carte piece of yellowtail sushi and the eel and green apple roll to test fish quality. After watching my food sit on the sushi bar counter for about ten minutes, it was finally brought to me and practically slammed onto the table, as the waitress had a nearby customer asking for more water. I was jostled, but I had food, and I was hungry, too. After finishing my meal and a solid ten minutes of waiting, my table was cleared and the check came. Once my card was down, the bill came back quickly (apparently money and letting in the next customer was NOW worth their time), and I was able to squeeze out of the tiny eatery. During the summer they open up the awning area of the restaurant to outdoor tables, but every time I’ve passed the restaurant, the inside is still claustrophobically full of people. In the end, I am giving the experience score a 13, because they were able to seat me relatively quickly and and they got me out of the restaurant quickly enough, but the at-table response time was terrible, I almost never had my water glass refilled, and the red color-scheme of the restaurant didn’t help the anger building up within me as I watched my sushi simply sit on the bartop, waiting for someone to bring it to me. From the experience alone, I probably won’t be eaten inside Sushi A Go-Go again any time soon. The lunch boxes taste about the same to go, anyway.
FOOD: All of my food came out at once (it had been sitting there all together), and the first thing I dug into was my lunchbox edamame. I can’t complain much about soybeans. They are easy to make and prepared well here, soft and chewy with some salt on them for flavor. The next thing I tried was the salad, which was made of a nice combination of vegetables, smothered by a sour, ginger dressing that countered would counter the sweetness of my eel well, so I decided to start with my sweeter roll. With the eel and apple roll, this restaurant seemed to announce that they were unable to grill their eel properly, so they found another way to add crunchiness to the roll. Indeed, the eel was soft and flimsy, but the roll had just the right amount of sauce so as not to be too sweet, and the sour apple contrasted with the eel nicely. I played off the eel roll with the rest of my salad, which created an interesting combined canon of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. The roll was quite small though, and if it hadn’t cost $6.50 normally, I might return to try that sushi and salad combination for dinner sometime. The Red Dragon roll came in the lunch box as a half-sized roll (that’s four thin pieces), and I’m kind of glad it was extra small in the end. Whoever came up with the idea of combining eel with spicy tuna should have their head examined. Maybe if the eel were extra crispy and the spicy tuna was somehow sweetened, the flavors could be faked, but there’s a reason eel is covered in sweet sauce usually. The consistancy of the eel in the roll mixed with the mushiness of the tuna and crunch of cucumber was nice, but the flavors just weren’t there. Eel is fairly bitter on its own, and the spicy tuna was spiced with some kind of chili sauce that made it hot but not rich, which made the flavor of this roll bitter and hot (yuck). I attempted to smother what was left of the eel sauce from my previous roll over the Red Dragon to give it some flavor, but luckily I finished the four pieces quickly and could move on. The Crazy Crab roll suffered from the same thing that affects most fresh crab rolls I’ve tried; SALT. The wasabi tobiko and spices were magically much tastier in this roll than they were in the Red Dragon, and again the added crunchiness of some added tempura flakes was welcome, but the flavor was overtaken by the salty crab, and it was rather difficult to grab what little remained of the flavor the roll should have had. This salty crab taste would stay in my mouth for a couple of hours, and I respected the combined flavors, but later regretted having it. Last on my plate was the yellowtail sushi, which was fine. There was no aftertaste, and even a little bit of the rich candy yellowtail flavor deel within the slice, but the fish still wasn’t the piece of sushi that made me worship the sushi bar from afar when I was a kid. So in the end I gave the food a score of 15 because it was altogether above average, but just barely. With a quality score of 7 for decent yellowtail and even offering real crab, the flavor score drops to 6 because other than the eel and apple roll, none of the selections I ordered were very good (either too salty or too flavorless). The creativity score gets a 7, because while many of the more expensive rolls are just mashups of mediocrity, there are a few things on the menuthat really are quite intriguing (green apple works with sushi, who knew?).
BILL: The bill for my lunch was relatively reasonable for a lunchbox, but for the $10 special, I wish I had gotten a little bit more for my buck. At the end of the day, this restaurant is located in Lincoln Center, though, which is one of the most expensive theater-going areas of New York, and most of the people who frequent Sushi A Go-Go have more than enough money to drop here, allowing the restaurant to wisely increase their menu prices. I was still able to try some of their special rolls (even if only half of them) through their lunch box, and although the eel and apple roll was small and expensive, it had good, strong flavors I had never tried before. Because the restaurant really should have ways all day long for residents on the prowl to eat on the cheap, and the service should be better for the buck, I’m giving the bill here a score of 14. This score should and could be higher with just a little more creativity on the part of this restaurant. At least the tuna and salmon rolls are decently priced. The service gets a score of six for forgetting about my food and being frantic, but still getting me my table and check quickly and effectively and not giving me any trouble when I asked for something.
Sushi A Go-Go was built for the rich folk of New York who can afford it’s crazy dinners and wild-but-small rolls, and I respect it as such. They found a niche where quality is not as important as fish with fancy names, and they know that by adding spicy tuna to everything they can attract the casual high-class spenders. If they were a few dollars cheaper and had a wider selection of rolls like the eel and green apple, I would probably visit this spot more often, especially due to it’s proximity to Lincoln Center. As it sits, the restaurant is too crowded and too pricy to get anything other than an occasional lunch box to go. And unless I’m working at the opera again any time soon, that probably is not going to happen.
