Kanpachi

According to yelpers, Kanpachi sushi is supposedly a great lunch spot for authentic and fresh sushi. I sincerely am starting to doubt yelpers' tastes after my visit to the south bay for sushi. I can't even hate on South Bay-ers because a large chunk of the population out there is Japanese and I would assume that they know what's up when it comes to sushi. Well, as my 9th grade Algebra teacher told the class, "You should never assume because you make an ASS out of U and ME." In other words, I assumed wrong.


I mean, don't get me wrong, I've had sushi at other joints in the South Bay, and they were legit-- one particular one I have in mind is Tsukiji Restaurant, on Redondo. But Kanpachi really should change their name to Kan-PUKE-chi or KanCOOchi. The food was just... atrocious, terrible, awful, and disgusting.


My friend Jane and I met there on a Thursday afternoon, right before the lunch crowd stumbled in. We were not allowed to sit at a table, as they reserved the tables for parties of 4 only. I thought this was quite rude, because I did not feel like sitting at the sushi bar, but apparently we did not have a choice in the matter.


We both ordered the "deluxe" sushi combo and shared a spicy tuna roll and a spider roll. The deluxe combo consisted of 1 piece of tuna roll, 1 piece of yellowtail roll, 1 piece of halibut roll, 3 pieces of cucumber rolls, and one of the each sushi: Maguro, Hamachi, Salmon, Halibut, Shrimp, Squid, Unagi, Egg, Ikura and Uni.


I think the safest piece of sushi that everyone can eat is Maguro-- tuna generally is the least fishiest and is pretty hard to get wrong. So when I put the piece of sushi in my mouth and all I could taste was a rotting piece of bait in my mouth, the kind that conjures images of last week's trash covered in maggots, I knew that something was wrong with this place. I had to spit it out into my napkin because it was SO bad. You can see in the photo that the tuna is grayish, because it was probably a month old.


As for the rest of the sushi, the yellowtail tasted old. The spider roll was over-fried and I couldn't taste any hint of crab in it. The shrimp was dry. Even the unagi-- perhaps the safest thing on my plate was a pathetic piece of shriveled eel. I gobbled up the egg because I felt horrible about wasting my money (I think the combination was 17 or 18 dollars). Even the spicy tuna roll tasted like odd... like doughy. There was virtually no fish in the filling.


There was not ONE thing that was even worth eating. The miso soup was a bizarre amalgamation of bacon (yes, bacon), carrots, and brownish tofu. It came with a chinese spoon, which I also found offensive.


I usually love uni, I think it is the perfect way to end sushi, as it has a nice sweet taste to it, but I was scared to try it, in fear of it being rotten at that point.


The weirdest thing, however, was that the place was packed, and with a healthy mix of JAPANESE people! I didn't get it. Was the sushi chef secretly trying to poison us? WTF?



Kanpachi Sushi
1425 W Artesia Blvd # 27
Gardena, CA 90248
(310) 515-1391