So Yoshino is a little brick restaurant in a bland looking building that you’d never spot if you weren’t looking for it.  And they’ve had a dirty banner up for years advertising their sushi so at first glance it’s a bit scary- that is if you’re easily scared by food. 

I love these kinds of places, they usually have the best food.  Now Yoshino has been around for more than 20 years and they’ve changed hands a few times.  And I first ate their 20 years ago.  Great steak teriyaki, fair sushi, and the tastiest salad dressing known to man which I asked for more on the side and doused my rice with it. Best. Rice. Ever.  Seriously.  A few years go by and one day I notice that my gorgeous tender rare steak teriyaki has mysteriously changed texture, consistency and taste, and apparently that was because they stopped using cow.

Naturally we didn’t go back for some time.  Feeling brave last summer we drove by, figuring that, by now they would surely have discontinued their use of random ruminant and we saw the posted inevitable fate of all donkey chefs, a closed sign.  So sad.  I missed them, donkey meat and all.  They were an institution of unadorned miso soup broth and inattentive waitresses.

Fortunately, one Sunday afternoon, inspired by the unaccommodating restaurants by the beach that won’t serve you dinner at 4:45,we called our old stand by Yoshino, and huzah! They’re back!  So we, and probably every disappointed senior looking for an early bird special, hurried in for the grand reopening!

Oh, glory be, still a hole in wall! Thank goodness, I hate it when people mess with imperfection.  We sit down to a satisfying bowl of extremely predictable miso soup, accompanied by some fair sushi, and steak teriyaki that has clearly been made with a very happy cow.  This is how I had remembered it from 20 years ago.  Like all great restaurants it had become a part of me.  I order extra salad dressing and blanket my sticky rice with it- the tastiest rice known to man, and still, for all my bribery, cannot get the sauce recipe out of them!  Oh well, one more reason to come back.

Yoshino
619-295-2232
1790 W. Washington St
San Diego, CA 92103
Tue-Fri 11:30 am – 2 pm
Tue-Thu, Sun 5 pm – 9 pm
Fri-Sat 5 pm – 10 pm