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Sushi restaurants - are they overrated"At JapanVisitor.com, we get numerous inquiries about making sushi bar bookings - mainly in Tokyo - which we pass on to our sister site, GoodsFromJapan.

Tokyo's top sushi bars are finicky places that generally don't take reservations directly from anyone living outside of Japan. Visitors must make bookings through their hotel concierge or through their credit card company. An often-encountered problem, however, is that the hotel concierge will only contact the restaurant once the guest has arrived, which, in the case of the more popular restaurants, is too late already.

Furthermore, sushi restaurants in Tokyo are, generally speaking, not particularly hospitable to non-Japanese. At rare best, foreign diners are made to feel welcome, usually they are tolerated, and quite often they are made to feel distinctly unwelcome, except, maybe, when their money is being taken at the end.
I have generally stopped going to sushi bars in big Japanese cities for the very reason that the chefs are often surly, sour old dinosaurs who feel so secure on what is seen as one of the pinnacles of Japanese culinary culture that acting hospitable - at least to non-Japanese customers - is below them. Hospitality is left to the often genuinely nice, but frazzled, overworked middle-aged woman who runs around the sushi restaurant for them.

There are, of course, exceptions to the "grumpy sushiya-san" rule, but once you've sat down and s...