The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Giza Street is
undoubtedly one of the busiest and loudest streets in Cairo. To counter-balance
this inconvenience, O Sushi attempts to present itself as a place where you can
have a nice, relaxing sushi dinner.

The restaurant
is relatively small and can roughly host a dozen diners. The soft background music
and the eye-level aquarium next to the sushi bar may fail to calm you down
because of the restaurant’s bright lights and street noise.

Unlike most
restaurants in the city, O Sushi has a digital-screen menu for every customer,
where you use a remote control to view all the items on the menu and then check and specify the number of items you
want. In this reviewer’s humble opinion,
this service is hardly necessary, as the waiters at O Sushi are very friendly
and efficient.

Outside the
restaurant, a big white board advertises an all-you-can-eat deal for 135LE seven
days a week, but when you flip the menu, you will find that this price is for
ladies only, and men have to pay 145LE.

For our first
round of sushi, we ordered Ika (7LE a piece), a raw calamari nigiri sushi;
Suzuki (7LE a piece), which is raw sea-bass; Tamago (5LE apiece), a sweet omelette
cooked nigiri sushi; and finally Ebi (7LE a piece), which is cooked shrimp. The
ika and Suzuki both had a rather unappetising chewy texture, but the Japanese
rice tasted nice. The Ebi had nothing special and tasted like home-cooked
shrimp. On the other hand, the sweetness of the Tamago made it the most
delicious sushi piece of the night.

Our second round
of orders presented us with better-tasting sushi. We ordered the Unagi (7LE a piece),
a fresh water eel with BBQ; the crispy roll (25LE for four pieces), which is
salmon or shrimp tempura with crab stick, cucumber and avocado in a crispy rice
roll; Philadelphia roll (25LE for four pieces); spicy chicken roll (16LE for four
pieces), made of teriyaki chicken, jalapeno and cucumber, in sesame seeds and
teriyaki sauce; and Pizza roll (30LE for four pieces), which consists of crab
stick, shrimp tempura, cream cheese, caviar, and spicy mayo.

The crispy roll
and the spicy chicken roll tasted pleasant enough, but was a little
bland-tasting compared to many of the other options. As for the pizza roll,
this roll was delicious and the thick, creamy taste of the cream cheese made it
one of our favourites. Finally, the salmon in the Philadelphia roll didn’t
taste fresh and its cream cheese filling was strangely not as thick and creamy
as the cheese in the pizza roll.

Following our
complaint about the salmon’s questionable freshness, we received three maki
pieces on the house, which were much fresher in taste.

As a restaurant,
O Sushi has a lot of potential. The fact that the chef and the waiters asked us
several times if we were satisfied with our food was a good sign; and we hope
that the sushi’s quality will improve the next time we pay O Sushi a visit.