SUSHI MOTO — Restaurant in Oklahoma City

Sushi Moto Asian Kitchen (Midtown)

Location: 432 NW 10th Street, OKC, OK, 73103; next to Kong’s Tavern and across from SSM St Anthony’s Hospital, in Midtown.

It’s in the same building where Gogi Sushi used to be.

Today is 24 Aug 2022. Their Grand Opening was the past week.

Restaurant: It’s an Asian restaurant that serves moto specialty sushi, classic sushi rolls, and different creations of sushi rolls with vegetable, fish and rice ingredients. They also have sashimi, tempura, and bento boxes. Most of the rolls are cooked and prepared with spicy ingredients and sauces.

They also have Poké bowls with choices of rice (steamed white or fried) or noodles( lo main or udon). You can pick which proteins you want from tofu, chicken, filet, salmon, and shrimp.

They have appetizers like coconut shrimp, fried egg rolls, and other lite bites.

Drinks: the menu shows Thai Tea, regular tea, fountain drinks, etc, but they don’t have Thai Tea yet, as that’s what I wanted. As they’re just getting started, they will have it available later.

My experience: I ordered the coconut shrimp appetizer which was delicious and served with a mildly spicy chili sauce. It came with 5 shrimp.

I got the salmon deluxe moto sushi roll which has 10 slices. It has avocado, asparagus, carrots, and crab salad inside the roll with sesame seeds and green onions on top of the salmon. It comes with a brown eel and yellow mango sauce drizzled over it and wasn’t spicy at all, as I don’t like too spicy, and it was mildly sweet, which I like.

I also got a Poké Teriyaki bowl with noodles, filet, carrots, mushrooms, white onions, broccoli and zucchini. It was delicious as well.

All the food came out very quickly and the app and Poké Bowl were piping hot. So this will be a great place to grab lunch; as they are very fast cooking your food to get you eating and on your way if you’re in a hurry.

I asked if they give a Veteran or military discount and the manager said they don’t right now; but he went ahead and gave me one, so that’s a 10-star in my book, and he even said thank you for your service, which is so sweet, as many personnel don’t do that in restaurant or business environments.

{Posted on Wed,...

It looks like a little hole-in-the-wall place, but with LED TV screen menus. There are laminated menus also readily available, which I much prefer. I had the Tootsi Roll, which is tempura salmon and cream cheese, topped with spicy mayo. My mom had a teriyaki chicken rice bowl.

My sushi was great. The salmon was lightly fried, so really only the two end pieces were fully cooked, so there were no dry bites. The texture was perfect. I personally prefer a bit more seaweed, but I'm one of those folks who snacks on toasted seaweed by itself, so unless you love seaweed that much, what they use is fine. I had a few bites of the teriyaki as well, and found it pleasantly smoky. It is not at all over sweet or over citrus-y, which is great. The consistency is perfect, and both the chicken pieces and the vegetable pieces were cooked perfectly. Nothing over or undercooked.

Only small annoyance was that the plastic cups they give for water do not have lids that fit, unlike the soda cups. This can be an issue if you have some kinds of disabilities, as well as if you simply want to take your water with you after you finish eating.

They do have a self-serve soda machine, and I also saw brewed tea. Pepsi products, including a Sobe flavor, which I rarely see in reataurants. (So of course, thats what I had.)

The price is very reasonable, and the portion sizes are fair, I think. My mom's rice bowl was rather large, and I saw another table order the bento box meal, which was even larger.

My sushi roll was comparatively priced to what I can get from Crest, but was obviously made to order, and higher quality. I generally stick to veggie rolls, because either its not a sushi place (like, Crest or Sprouts), or because fish rolls can get rather expensive... but none of the fish rolls on the menu seemed very pricey to me, and you can watch the chefs making the sushi, so you can see the quality of the fish is good.

I don't often find myself in that part of town, but SushiMOTO is definitely a place I would go to again if I am...

The best things 1st-- the staff is absolutely on point with everything as far as the hospitality. From the top down they are pure gold.

Despite the medium low overall rating I'm giving this place and the heavy criticism on the cuisine,I would feel comfortable taking other people here because the atmosphere is quiet and the hospitality service is superb. The food isn't disgusting,, just not what I was looking for when I was looking for Japanese. Good place for long conversations. Which leads me to be transparent about--

My biases that heavily come into play here: a) I lived in Japan for years and very partial to their food and traditions; and, b) I am never a fan of mayonnaise as anything more than a very light drizzle.

The tangy sauce used on my fried tofu was far too much mayonnaise and a little splash of sriracha for color. It was very nauseating for me to pop it into my mouth expecting something like a sweet chili lime sauce and instead getting a huge mouthful of hot, de-emulsified mayo, absolutely drenching my proteins.

My bento meal was almost three times the size of a real bento, and the recipes used we're just lacking in that fresh clean feeling I always get after eating Japanese cuisine.

The tempura battering technique was all wrong. Tempura is very light and crisp because of this specialized technique, it keeps the vegetables crisp but cooked, while these were just deep-fried & soggy. Frankly it tasted exactly like the sides at Arby's. Very heavy.

BUT THE WORST IS THE RICE! If an Asian restaurant can't get the sticky rice down... If I can't pick up the whole scoop with my chopsticks... and instead, it starts to crumble... you're doing it wrong! They used the wrong grains for both my hand roll and my bento serving. It's the heart of Asian food... AND IT WASN'T...