SAKANA ∞
I went to Sakana on a Tuesday in August because I was hungry.
I need to say this plainly, because I have not said anything plainly in several chapters, and the saying of a thing plainly — I was hungry, I wanted sushi, I drove to the restaurant — is a skill I am relearning after eleven months of building sentences that required load-bearing walls and structural reinforcement. I was hungry. I wanted sushi. I had heard about Sakana the way most people hear about restaurants: someone told me. The Concierge, months ago, in a list of places he described as "the ones that don't need you." I had filed the name. I had not researched it. I had not cross-referenced it with the five book, because the five book was in a desk drawer in my hotel room, and it had been in the desk drawer since Henderson, and the desk drawer was where it belonged.
I drove south on Maryland Parkway at 9:40 PM on a Tuesday. Maryland Parkway is not a street that appears in dining guides. It is a four-lane road that runs from downtown Las Vegas past the university, past strip malls and cell phone stores and tire shops and the particular constellation of businesses that serve a student population — cheap, open late, uninterested in the tourist economy three blocks west. Sakana is in one of these strip malls, in the same plaza as a Target. The parking lot was full. This was the first piece of information.
The second piece of information was the wait. Forty-five minutes on a Tuesday at ten o'clock at night. Forty-five minutes to eat at a restaurant in a strip mall on Maryland Parkway, not because a celebrity chef had been profiled in a magazine and not because an algorithm had placed it at the top of a ranked list but because the restaurant was good and the people who lived near it knew the restaurant was good and they came, on a Tuesday, at ten, and waited. The wait was the review. Everything after the wait was elaboration.
I should describe the restaurant.
Sakana occupies a corner unit in the plaza. The interior is larger than the storefront suggests — a common feature of strip-mall restaurants, which hide their capacity behind facades designed for a different business. The lighting is low. The music is not what I expected — not the ambient Japanese instrumentals of a sushi restaurant performing its own aesthetic, but reggaeton, R&B, something Latin and upbeat, the music of a room that has decided to be a place where people enjoy themselves rather than a place where people perform the act of dining. The tables are close together. The room is loud. The loudness is not a design flaw. The loudness is the sound of a full restaurant on a Tuesday night, which is a sound I have been learning to hear as music since Frankie's Tiki Room in March.
The hostess seated me at a two-top near the sushi bar. She handed me a tablet. The tablet was the menu.
I need to talk about the menu.
The all-you-can-eat menu at Sakana contains over one hundred items. I counted. The counting was not obsessive — the counting was professional, the reflex of a person who has been cataloging restaurants for eleven months and who cannot look at a menu without measuring it. Over one hundred items: nigiri, specialty rolls, hand rolls, appetizers, soups, salads, skewers, rice dishes, noodles, desserts. The categories alone number ten. The items within each category are not padding — they are not the same fish presented six ways to inflate a number. They are one hundred distinct preparations, each requiring its own ingredients, its own technique, its own place in the kitchen's choreography.
One hundred items. Twenty-eight dollars and ninety-five cents. Ninety minutes.
On the Strip, three blocks west, a restaurant whose name I will not print charges five hundred and ninety-five dollars for a tasting menu of eleven courses. Eleven items, selected by the chef, served in a sequence the chef has determined, in portions the chef has calibrated, at a pace the chef controls. You eat what you are given. You eat how much you are given. You are grateful for the experience of having been given.
At Sakana, for twenty-eight dollars and ninety-five cents, you are given a tablet with one hundred items and told: choose. Choose everything. Choose anything. Choose the salmon belly and the spider roll and the garlic tuna nigiri and the lobster tempura and the chicken karaage and the gyoza and the mochi ice cream. Choose the items you know and the items you have never tried. Choose badly — order too much and they will charge you for the waste, which is the restaurant's single rule, the only constraint on the abundance, and the constraint is not a limitation but a teaching: abundance requires respect. Take everything. Waste nothing. The everything and the nothing are the same lesson.
I ordered.
I am going to list what I ordered because the list is the review.
Round one: salmon belly nigiri, two pieces. Seared lemon salmon nigiri, two pieces. Yuzu yellowtail, two pieces. Garlic tuna, two pieces. Edamame. Chicken karaage. A spider roll, half-size — Sakana allows half-rolls, which is an innovation so sensible that its rarity across the industry constitutes an indictment. The half-roll means: try more. The half-roll means: breadth over depth. The half-roll means: the restaurant would rather you taste six things than fill up on two.
The salmon belly arrived. The fish was draped over the rice with the particular generosity of a kitchen that is not counting — a ratio of fish to rice that favored the fish, that said this is the thing, the rice is the vehicle, the vehicle is not the destination. I ate the salmon belly. The fat dissolved. The fish was cold and clean and tasted like the ocean, or like the idea of the ocean, or like the memory of the first time I tasted fish that tasted like the ocean, which was in Tsukiji Market in 2008, which was seventeen years ago, which is a long time to carry a flavor in your memory, and the salmon belly at Sakana tasted like that memory refreshed — the same note, struck again, in a strip mall on Maryland Parkway, at $28.95 for everything.
Round two: the Orange Blossom roll, half. The Full Moon roll, half. Shrimp tempura roll, full — some rolls should not be halved; the shrimp tempura roll is a commitment and should be committed to. A bowl of miso soup. Two pieces of ama ebi — sweet shrimp, raw, the tails deep-fried and served alongside, the combination of the raw sweetness and the fried crunch a duet that I have ordered at a hundred sushi restaurants and that I order at every sushi restaurant because the duet never gets old and the never-getting-old is the test.
The ama ebi was good. The ama ebi is always the test, and Sakana passed the test, and the passing was not extraordinary — the passing was competent, reliable, the flavor of a kitchen that has made this item ten thousand times and has not grown bored of making it well. The not-growing-bored was the review.
Round three. Round four. I lost count of rounds. This is not a failure of documentation — this is the documentation. I stopped counting. The counting stopped because the counting was not necessary, because the practice had reduced to the four verbs and the verbs did not include count, and the not-counting was the liberation I had been approaching since Henderson, since the tunnel, since the parking lot on South Main Street where I wrote a blank in my notebook where the name of a filling should have been.
I ate the Baked Lobster roll. I ate the rainbow roll. I ate two pieces of unagi nigiri, the eel glazed and torched, the sweetness almost too much and then exactly enough. I ate gyoza — pan-fried, the bottoms crisp, the pork inside seasoned with ginger and scallion, the dipping sauce sharp with rice vinegar. I ate a skewer of beef with teriyaki glaze. I ate mochi ice cream — green tea, the ice cream hard from the freezer, the mochi shell yielding, the temperature contrast a small pleasure that required no analysis.
I ate for eighty-seven minutes. I know this because the server told me I had three minutes left and I had not noticed the time passing. The not-noticing was the review. The not-noticing was the five stars.
The five stars. I need to talk about the five stars.
This is the fifth five-star rating in this guide. The first was Frankie's Tiki Room, in March — a bar, not a restaurant, reviewed in a notebook I do not remember closing. The second was Lotus of Siam, the Thai restaurant on East Sahara that is the best Thai restaurant I have eaten at in the United States and possibly the best Thai restaurant outside of Thailand, a claim I have made in print and will defend. The third was the Italian American Club, the private dining room on East Sahara where the red sauce tasted like 1973 and the five stars were a demand the restaurant made of me. The fourth was Herbs & Rye, the cocktail bar and steakhouse on West Sahara where I understood at midnight that the city I had been reviewing during the day was not the city.
The fifth is Sakana. A strip-mall AYCE sushi restaurant on Maryland Parkway, open until midnight, $28.95 for everything, where I ate for eighty-seven minutes on a Tuesday in August and forgot to count the rounds and forgot to count the fives and forgot, for eighty-seven minutes, that I was a person who counted anything.
Five five-star restaurants. A pentagon. I know this. I have known this since Chapter 9, when I plotted the five-star restaurants on a map and the shape emerged — five points, a pentagon, the sacred geometry of a religion I had not yet joined and a conspiracy I had not yet understood and a practice I had not yet simplified to four verbs. I know the pentagon is complete. I know the five-star count has reached its destined number. I am noting this, and I am not going to dwell on it, because the dwelling would be the old practice, the five-counting, the obsessive numerology that consumed Course Four and that I set down in a desk drawer in a hotel room and that I am not picking up again.
The pentagon is complete. The shape is the shape. The five-star restaurants are the five-star restaurants. I am going to talk about the rating.
I wrote "five stars" in the small notebook. I looked at the words. The words were wrong.
Not wrong the way a review can be wrong — not inaccurate, not dishonest. The five stars were earned. The food was good, the value was extraordinary, the experience was joyful, the kitchen was consistent, the eighty-seven minutes were eighty-seven minutes of a person eating sushi and being happy, and being happy in a restaurant is the thing, the only thing, the thing beneath the methodology and the rubric and the rating system and the practice. Being happy in a restaurant. I have been doing this for years and for eleven months in Las Vegas and the five stars were correct.
But the five stars were also a container, and the container was too small.
Five is a number. Five is the largest number on my scale. Five is the ceiling, the maximum, the point beyond which the system says: there is nothing higher. Five means: the best. And the best is a category that implies scarcity — the best is rare, the best is exclusive, the best is the thing at the top of the hierarchy, and the hierarchy is the Curse, the ranking, the arrangement of experience into a sequence from worst to best that I have spent my career constructing and that I am, in this strip mall on Maryland Parkway, on my fifth five-star review, understanding for the first time as a limitation rather than a tool.
The limitation is not the number. The limitation is the finitude. Five stars means: this is the most I can give. And the most-I-can-give is a sentence that belongs to the old practice, the practice of scarcity, the practice of a critic who rations their highest rating because the rationing preserves the rating's value, the way a currency maintains its value through controlled supply.
But Sakana is not scarcity. Sakana is one hundred items for $28.95. Sakana is a restaurant that says: have everything. Sakana is abundance — the opposite of the $595 tasting menu, the opposite of the controlled portion and the chef's sequence and the three-hour dinner where you eat what you are given and you are grateful. Sakana is: here is a tablet with one hundred items and ninety minutes and the only rule is don't waste it.
I crossed out "five stars." I wrote: ∞.
The symbol arrived the way the four stars had arrived at the parking lot on South Main Street — without calculation, without the five book, without a rubric. The symbol arrived because the meal had been infinite — not in duration (eighty-seven minutes) and not in quantity (I ate perhaps thirty items) but in possibility. One hundred items. I could have ordered any of them. I could have ordered all of them. The menu did not end. The abundance did not end. The kitchen did not say: this is the most we can give. The kitchen said: here is everything, and everything is $28.95, and if you come back tomorrow everything will still be here, and the day after, and the day after, and the everything does not diminish.
∞. The rating is infinity. The methodology has not broken. The methodology has done what a methodology does when it is applied with sufficient rigor to a sufficient quantity of reality — it has transcended itself. Five stars was the scale. Infinity is what the scale becomes when the scale meets abundance, when the container meets the thing that will not be contained, when a data journalist's rating system meets a strip-mall sushi restaurant that has been offering everything to everyone for $28.95 since before the data journalist arrived and will continue offering everything to everyone after the data journalist has left.
This is either a joke or a proof. The Discordian answer is yes.
I need to tell you about the student.
I was on round four — or five, or three, the rounds had stopped being distinct — when a person at the next table said, to no one in particular, to their phone, or to the piece of salmon nigiri they were holding: "The Law of Fives is never wrong."
I looked up.
The person was in their mid-twenties. Laptop open next to their plate, which contained the remains of what appeared to be a substantial order — a person who ate here regularly, who knew the menu, who had optimized their selection the way a regular optimizes. On the laptop screen, I could see a PDF. I recognized the layout before I recognized the text. The yellow. The typographic chaos. Discordia Decompiled.
"Excuse me," I said.
They looked up. They had the expression of a person who had been addressed by a stranger in a restaurant and was deciding how much social energy to invest in the interaction.
"Are you reading Discordia Decompiled?" I said.
"I'm writing about it," they said. "Dissertation. Discordian epistemology and post-truth information ecology." They paused. "It sounds more serious than it is."
"It sounds exactly as serious as it is," I said.
They looked at me with the particular attention of a person who has just heard a stranger say something that suggests familiarity with their subject. "You know Discordianism?"
I considered how to answer this question. I considered the eleven months. I considered the five book in the desk drawer and the Pope Card in my wallet and the decoded specials boards and the ceremony dinner and the tunnel and the truck that did not exist and the four verbs and the pentagon and the small notebook in my back pocket that contained the word ∞ next to the name of the restaurant we were both currently sitting in. I considered saying: I have been living inside a Discordian operation for eleven months and I may be conducting it and I may be the subject of it and the distinction collapsed somewhere around June.
"A little," I said.
They told me about their dissertation. They had discovered Discordianism on Reddit two years ago. Someone had posted a link to Discordia Decompiled in a thread about epistemological anarchism. They had read it in one sitting, at this table — "I always sit at this table, they know me here" — and had spent two years writing about the intersection of Discordian thought and the post-truth media environment, about how a religion founded as a joke in a bowling alley in 1958 had produced an epistemological framework that was more useful for understanding the current information landscape than anything the philosophy department had published in twenty years.
"The Law of Fives," they said. "It's the most important idea in the text. Not because it's true — because it's a demonstration. You tell someone to look for fives and they find fives. You tell someone to look for conspiracies and they find conspiracies. The looking creates the finding. The finding confirms the looking. The loop is the lesson."
"I know," I said.
"Most people think it's a joke," they said.
"It's the funniest serious thing I've encountered this year," I said.
"How did you find it?" they asked. "The text."
I considered the answer. A woman with showgirl posture in a tiki bar. A Pope Card. Eleven hours I do not remember clearly. A yellow paperback on a bar. A URL visited at 3 AM. A physical copy handed to me at a ceremony dinner where the sacrament was a hot dog without a bun.
"A link," I said. "Someone sent me a link."
This was true. It was not complete. It was the most honest incomplete answer I could give, and the incompleteness was a kindness — to the student, who did not need to hear about the pentagon, and to myself, because the full answer would have taken eleven chapters and I had three minutes left on my ninety-minute seating.
"Are you a student?" they asked.
"I'm a food critic," I said.
They looked at their plate. They looked at my plate. They looked at the tablet with the one-hundred-item menu. They looked back at me.
"You're reviewing Sakana?"
"Yes."
"How many stars?"
I showed them the notebook. The ∞ symbol, written in pen, next to the restaurant's name.
They laughed. The laugh was genuine — the laugh of a person who studies Discordian epistemology encountering Discordian epistemology in the wild, in a strip-mall sushi restaurant, at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night, from a stranger who had arrived at the same ideas from the opposite direction.
"That's the most Discordian thing I've ever seen," they said.
"I know," I said.
"Can I put this in my dissertation?"
"All rites reversed," I said.
They laughed again. I laughed. The server came and told me my ninety minutes were up and I could stay for dessert if I wanted. I ordered mochi ice cream — green tea — and ate it at the counter while the student returned to their laptop and their PDF and their dissertation on a religion that two people in a strip-mall sushi restaurant on Maryland Parkway both understood and could not explain and did not need to explain, because the explaining was not the point. The point was the sushi and the laughter and the midnight and the Tuesday and the one hundred items and the $28.95 and the ∞ in a notebook and the mochi ice cream melting, slowly, inside its skin.
Practical Information:
How to get there: Sakana is at 3949 S Maryland Pkwy, in the plaza with the Target, approximately three blocks east of the Strip and directly north of the UNLV campus. If you are a tourist, you will need a car or a rideshare, because no one will tell you about this restaurant. The algorithms will suggest the Strip. Ignore the algorithms.
What to expect: A wait. Thirty to ninety minutes, depending on the night. There are no reservations. You put your name on the list at the hostess stand and you wait. The wait is not a bug. The wait is the evidence.
What to know: The all-you-can-eat dinner menu is $28.95 per person. Over one hundred items. Ninety-minute time limit. Premium items — the uni, the ama ebi, the salmon belly — are limited to one piece per person, which is the restaurant's only rationing, and even this rationing is generous. Half-rolls are available and recommended: order half-rolls of everything rather than full rolls of a few things. The breadth is the experience. Leftovers are charged, because abundance is not waste and the distinction matters. Beverages are not included. The 2-for-1 drink special is real.
What to eat: Everything. This is not a recommendation. This is the review. The salmon belly nigiri. The seared lemon salmon. The spider roll. The ama ebi with the fried tails. The chicken karaage. The mochi ice cream. The garlic tuna. The gyoza. The Orange Blossom roll, which I cannot describe because I have exceeded my capacity for describing food and the exceeding is itself a description of the restaurant — a place where the food exceeds the language available to describe it, where one hundred items is more items than a single reviewer can review in a single sitting, where the abundance is the point and the point is the abundance.
What it costs: $28.95 for everything. In a city that charges $595 for eleven courses, $28.95 for one hundred items is not a bargain. It is a thesis. The thesis is: abundance is possible. The thesis is: the scarcity is imposed. The thesis is: a strip-mall restaurant on Maryland Parkway has been proving this every day from 11 AM to midnight and the proof has been here the whole time and the whole time is the point.
∞.