Ayaki sushi: the review of the new all you can eat restaurant in Imola

The Ayaki restaurant in Imola is the classic all-you-can-eat restaurant, wherewith 12.90 euros for lunch (and 24.90 for dinner) you can eat whatever you want. Do not expect a sushi master with Hattori Hanzo’s katana to make sushi. There are no Japanese, and the cuisine mixes dishes ranging from classic sushi to sashimi, passing through some Chinese and Japanese dishes revisited simplistically.

There is already a lot to discuss all you can eat (misleading and educational), not to mention pernicious, which degrades the idea of food, transforming it from pleasure (and survival) to a greedy orgy of cheap consumerism. But the worst is that these places, however glossy they may be, offer an average quality of food that can never be more than mediocre. The reason is straightforward: fish costs money, and to think that for 24 euros, you can eat a lot is ridiculous. They make money with drinks, but no one ever gives anything away, that’s for sure.

It does not want to be a personal attack on the Ayaki restaurant. This applies to every all-you-can-eat restaurant. It is a barbarism afflicting our society from the depths.

All you can eat is the opposite of Japanese cuisine. Sushi is a frantic search for the best quality, carved in a single gesture, made by hands that have worked for 10 years before arriving at the sushi noob slave level.

If you eat at the Ayaki restaurant, you will not have a bad experience.

The dishes are assembled in an accurate and picturesque way, so much so that you will find a hundred interpretations of rolls and maki on the menu.

But do not expect authentic Japanese cuisine. It is the usual restaurant that winks and seduces you with the formula of the eat until you explode, and the litmus test is the tuna.

While the various fancy maki and cheese, fish roe, and fried stuffed rolls aren’t bad, the problems begin with trying tuna sashimi. We tried it on two occasions. The first time the color was disturbing, and the texture and flavor were not incisive. The second time it was a little better but always subdued.

Another shortcoming is salmon: fatty and redundant in flavor and texture. But this is an impossible problem to solve as long as people continue to eat salmon from factory farms fed antibiotics and share 2 cubic cm in 50.

The gyoza-type grilled dumplings were ok, even if the filling was too salty and dry.

Cantonese rice is not bad. The flaccid and bolsa tempura arrived already cold, so maybe 20 minutes before, it was not even to be despised.

The service fluctuates: the staff does not show significant reactivity and enthusiasm or even a propensity for the Italian language, but our waitress was kind enough, and everything we asked for was brought to us in one way or another.

The restaurant has almost caused a scandal. The complaints are ridiculous: the portions are small, it costs more than the other all you can eat, and you can’t order the same dish twice.

And this says it all about how bleak it is to talk about Japanese cuisine in Italy. If you are used to going to eat in the all you can eat for 10 euros there is a problem, food cannot and should not be so cheap.

The price is paid elsewhere: scarce raw materials, questionable hygiene conditions, environmental impact and sustainability, low wages for employees.

But in reality, the fact that the Ayaki restaurant charges more is good. We started by heavily criticizing this sushi, but it is much better than the usual plastic sushi and overcooked rice with forget-me sauce.

We are light years away from authentic Japanese cuisine, but many don’t know this, and the fact that you can eat limitlessly is a siren with an irresistible song.

In the end, many words, but reviewing an all-you-can-eat restaurant doesn’t even make much sense. It was a way to criticize the perverse concept of this barbaric formula. You will not find a better fake Japanese restaurant in Imola.