Sushi Zanmai

Instead of having a traditional Japanese breakfast, we opted to have a sushi breakfast at Sushi Zanmai. We’d never had sushi for breakfast and thought we should definitely experience it.

Our hotel, the Park Hotel, now has the option to have sushi breakfast instead of their fantastic breakfast buffet. All we had to do was let the front desk know we wanted to exchange our normal breakfast voucher for a voucher for Sushi Zanmai. We simply had to get there.

Sushi Zanmai is located in the market streets of Tsukiji Outer Market next to where the famous fish market once resided. Initially finding the restaurant took some time because Google Maps gave us two different locations.

Once we found Sushi Zanmai we walked in and were instantly (and loudly) greeted by the entire staff who all shouted together. We weren’t expecting that, but it was fun, and we enjoyed watching and hearing them do the same shout for each customer who came after. We were seated at the bar with many of the fresh fish chilled behind glass in front of us.

We handed the server our voucher instead of taking an order. We watched the chefs prepare many different fish for the patrons while we waited for our meal. We were given our drinks and a cup of miso soup. After a short time we were both given a large plate with 13 different pieces of sushi.

The plate consisted of hotate (scallops), aji (horse mackerel), ikura (salmon roe), ika (squid), bincho (albacore tuna), tako (octopus), tamago (sweet omelet), ebi (shrimp), buri (yellowtail), samon (salmon), unagi (freshwater eel), maguro (tuna), and chu-toro (fatty tuna). Everything was delicious, but the squid was very tough and took too long to chew thoroughly and eat. It probably should have been a smaller piece. We love unagi and were sad to see there was no sauce on it - it was just grilled. We knew it would still be good, but to our surprise it was actually fantastic, much better than we expected it to be.