A recent post on a blog I follow got me thinking — I am constantly Facebooking about Mexican sushi and introducing visitors to it, but I have never blogged about it. The time has come.

Mexican sushi is mostly rolls, with ingredients like mango, banana, chilis, etc. breaking up the normal Japanese stuff. Tampico figures largely — that's a mix of surimi (krab), mayonnaise, onion, jalapeños and lime. And don't just dip those exotic rolls in soy sauce — try lime-flavored soy sauce with chives and chilis floating in it. Wasabi optional.



I met someone once who used to work at the corporate headquarters of Sushi Itto, the biggest Mexican sushi chain. She told me that the restaurant started out with regular sushi, and that the Mexican guests would ask the chefs to add things like chilis. At first, the chefs refused. But then the owner ordered them to go with it, and a new cuisine was born!

There are plenty of places to choose from around here, but my favorite Mexican sushi joint is Moshi Moshi. Actually, it's also a chain. We probably hit it up about 50% of all Friday nights. What's not to like?

There's a conveyor belt, for starters. W was asleep on the table in his snowman suit, but I know one day he'll love the conveyor belt. One time when we were at this restaurant, between the plates of sushi there was a toy car making the rounds. Some little boy had put it on there and seeing it go all around the restaurant probably, like, made his week.



The sushi is amazing. Here are some examples:
This one has shrimp and tajín (a type of chili powder) on the outside, and mango, cucumber, avocado and cream cheese on the inside. Warning: if you don't like cream cheese, you're not going to like Mexican sushi. (Although the same can probably be said of avocado, and yet somehow I manage.)


This is just a normal old California roll. Fish eggs outside, crab, avocado, cucumber and cream cheese inside. Oldie but goodie.


This is a simple favorite of mine — mini-rolls with cream cheese and chamoy, a purplish-red sauce that combines fruit, salt and chili. I know it might sound weird to the uninitiated. And honestly it still tastes sort of weird to my gringo taste buds. But trust me, this is a winning combination.


These rolls had fried plantain on the outside and had shrimp, shittake mushrooms, cucumber and cream cheese inside. (Which reminds me of another important aspect of Mexican sushi: it is often not raw — good for the preggos — and sometimes it's even cooked.)


These are just a few of my favorites. Believe me, I can go through a lot more than this in one night! At Moshi Moshi, since you just pluck what you want off the conveyor belt, the plates are color coded, so the waiter counts the different colors and that's how you know how much you owe. Looking at your own pile of plates... that's how you know a night went well!