MAKOMAE - Diamond Bar, CA

Slave girl asked me what I wanted for my birthday, well duh, hot steamy bedroom fun, what else? But first, I must fuel myself up with some raw fish.

My good friend Charlie suggested this place for omakase and I trust his judgment when it comes to sushi. We made a reservation ahead and ready for some good sushi time.

That's the owner/main chef

 

We brought our own sake and the corkage fee was $20. The rule is, if they serve it in the restaurant, you can't bring the same brand and have to purchase theirs. So make sure to ask if you can bring your sake before you go.

We sat at the sushi bar but sadly we didn't get the owner chef to make the omakase for us. I tried to converse with our chef, Taka, but I guess he wasn't very talkative and I barely got any words out of him. It kind of made the sushi bar seating boring.

For our omakase, we got:
Red snapper

Sea scallop

Baked oyster

Sea snail from Hokkaido

Toro

Spanish mackerel

Blue crab

Sardine

Salmon roe

Blue fin tuna

Miyazaki beef

Uni

Sweet shrimp

Black cod

Jelly fish

Shrimp head miso

Live octopus

Octopus socket

Squid with uni sushi

Albacore

Tuna stew

Truly, I enjoyed all the sushi due to their freshness, but for omakase, I was sonewhat disappointed because everything I got were already on the menu. Nothing special from the chef and I could easily just ordered 2/3 of the restaurant menu (including all the items on the special board) for the same thing. Our tab was about $70-$75 per person and the cost was pretty much the same as ordering a la cart to share. Don't get me wrong, they were good, but just not the omakase I had in mind.

I also ordered spicy tuna handroll and one more blue crab sushi. Spicy tuna had a lot of tendons and very chewy, I wouldn't recommend it. Blue crab sushi though, it was really fresh and I love how it was already de-shelled. If you ever had blue crab before in a shell, you know how much pain it is to extract the meat.

Tendon hell

At the end we got a slice of green tea cake to share for having a birthday there. It was a happy ending for sure. Would I go back? Here's the part that might gross you out (maybe not). Towards to the end of our dinner, I noticed our sushi chef's nails. It was filled with black stuff and I couldn't confirm what it was. It could be dirt, it could be seaweed, I don't know, but I was totally grossed out. The only way to help me to pass that mental block was to think his nails still remained dark at the end so that meant none of those foreign objects got into my food...

Let's hope it was seaweed.