Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

Dining in restaurants: allowed, but still optional

For small restaurants such as Sushi Tadokoro, take-out orders mean a lot

The nigiri special at Sushi Tadokoro, available to go for $26
The nigiri special at Sushi Tadokoro, available to go for $26

When 2020 began, I did not expect to spend two and a half months writing about take out and delivery. Since dining rooms re-opened in late May, it’s been fun, and at times felt a bit daring, to return to writing about on-premise restaurant experiences. Even if those experiences have been eerily dystopian, characterized by half-empty restaurants, sneeze guards, and cubrebocas.

Place

Sushi Tadokoro

2244 San Diego Avenue, San Diego

However, I should still be writing about take out. Because, despite being open, most local restaurants are still counting on take-out orders to survive the pandemic. Especially the smaller ones.

Restaurants including Sushi Tadokoro, in Old Town. Its namesake owner, Takeaki Tadokoro, brings traditional edomae-style sushi to San Diego, including delicacies he learned to prepare growing up as a young sushi chef in Japan. His small sushi bar and dining room is the kind of place a food-lover like yours truly goes to eat on his birthday. Preferably omakase, with a great bottle of sake to start things off.

Sponsored
Sponsored
Shoji screens help separate tables, but reduce seating capacity.

It’s not just that Tadokoro offers exceptional or hard to find food and drink. The restaurant’s smallness, its intimacy, is part of the appeal. Don’t get me wrong — several of the city’s finest restaurants are large, high-volume affairs, and necessarily well known. But what use is an urban dining scene without the intimate, less talked about places? The restaurant name you keep in your back pocket to impress a date, or perhaps a friend from the ‘burbs, who can’t get anything resembling Tokyo-style edamame sushi where they live?

A sushi order sheet kept in a plastic sleeve

Sushi Tadokoro is open with seated dining for lunch and dinner, and the restaurant space elegantly accommodates distanced dining, with shoji screen dividers between tables, a clear plastic barrier between chefs and sushi bar patrons, and paper order sheets sheathed in plastic. Tadokoro and his wife have overachieved on the clean air front, having invested hundreds of dollars each on ultraviolet, ionic, and HEPA air filtration systems to protect staff and diners further.

However, for a sushi joint that maxes out around 30 diners in the best of times, Tadokoro can only fit half or less its normal capacity, at the busiest of times. In the restaurant business, if a busy Saturday night can’t make up for a slow Tuesday, the restaurant is in trouble.

Sushi Tadokoro in Old Town, open for dine-in, but also encouraging take-out

So, as inviting as the Tadokoros have made their authentic Japanese dining experience, even during the pandemic, they also find themselves in the unexpected position of encouraging customers to order take-out orders. They’ve prepared both sushi and sake to-go menus.

The sake menu discounts mid- to high-end bottles you’re unlikely to find anywhere other than a quality Japanese restaurant in this town. The sushi menu features a full list of individual nigiri and cut roll options, as well as select sashimi orders. But it includes highlights from Tadokoro’s lunch specials menu, including a $26 nigiri combo (8 pieces plus a half roll), and $40 chirashi box that features a wider assortment of fish, served over rice. For those who can afford it, there’s an omakase (chef’s choice) special for $85, which is 20 percent cheaper than pre-covid dining.

Miso black cod

That omakase will be the best way to sample the sort of rare finds that help make Sushi Tadokoro a valued presence in San Diego dining, including prized Japanese imports. Chef Tadokoro tells me that, after an initial disruption, he’s able to get fish from Japan again, even if it costs him more to keep such things on the menu as iwashi (sardines), golden eye snapper, nodoguro (seaperch), and uni from Hokkaido.

There are benefits to dining in at Sushi Tadokoro — such as ordering a sweet and succulent black cod. But the truth is, we don’t all need to rush out to support local restaurants, just because they’re welcoming diners again. Our support is just as valuable — arguably more so — when we take it home. Even when it’s something special.

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

How to make a hit Christmas song

Feeling is key, but money helps too
Next Article

San Diego Holiday Experiences

As soon as Halloween is over, it's Christmas time in my mind
The nigiri special at Sushi Tadokoro, available to go for $26
The nigiri special at Sushi Tadokoro, available to go for $26

When 2020 began, I did not expect to spend two and a half months writing about take out and delivery. Since dining rooms re-opened in late May, it’s been fun, and at times felt a bit daring, to return to writing about on-premise restaurant experiences. Even if those experiences have been eerily dystopian, characterized by half-empty restaurants, sneeze guards, and cubrebocas.

Place

Sushi Tadokoro

2244 San Diego Avenue, San Diego

However, I should still be writing about take out. Because, despite being open, most local restaurants are still counting on take-out orders to survive the pandemic. Especially the smaller ones.

Restaurants including Sushi Tadokoro, in Old Town. Its namesake owner, Takeaki Tadokoro, brings traditional edomae-style sushi to San Diego, including delicacies he learned to prepare growing up as a young sushi chef in Japan. His small sushi bar and dining room is the kind of place a food-lover like yours truly goes to eat on his birthday. Preferably omakase, with a great bottle of sake to start things off.

Sponsored
Sponsored
Shoji screens help separate tables, but reduce seating capacity.

It’s not just that Tadokoro offers exceptional or hard to find food and drink. The restaurant’s smallness, its intimacy, is part of the appeal. Don’t get me wrong — several of the city’s finest restaurants are large, high-volume affairs, and necessarily well known. But what use is an urban dining scene without the intimate, less talked about places? The restaurant name you keep in your back pocket to impress a date, or perhaps a friend from the ‘burbs, who can’t get anything resembling Tokyo-style edamame sushi where they live?

A sushi order sheet kept in a plastic sleeve

Sushi Tadokoro is open with seated dining for lunch and dinner, and the restaurant space elegantly accommodates distanced dining, with shoji screen dividers between tables, a clear plastic barrier between chefs and sushi bar patrons, and paper order sheets sheathed in plastic. Tadokoro and his wife have overachieved on the clean air front, having invested hundreds of dollars each on ultraviolet, ionic, and HEPA air filtration systems to protect staff and diners further.

However, for a sushi joint that maxes out around 30 diners in the best of times, Tadokoro can only fit half or less its normal capacity, at the busiest of times. In the restaurant business, if a busy Saturday night can’t make up for a slow Tuesday, the restaurant is in trouble.

Sushi Tadokoro in Old Town, open for dine-in, but also encouraging take-out

So, as inviting as the Tadokoros have made their authentic Japanese dining experience, even during the pandemic, they also find themselves in the unexpected position of encouraging customers to order take-out orders. They’ve prepared both sushi and sake to-go menus.

The sake menu discounts mid- to high-end bottles you’re unlikely to find anywhere other than a quality Japanese restaurant in this town. The sushi menu features a full list of individual nigiri and cut roll options, as well as select sashimi orders. But it includes highlights from Tadokoro’s lunch specials menu, including a $26 nigiri combo (8 pieces plus a half roll), and $40 chirashi box that features a wider assortment of fish, served over rice. For those who can afford it, there’s an omakase (chef’s choice) special for $85, which is 20 percent cheaper than pre-covid dining.

Miso black cod

That omakase will be the best way to sample the sort of rare finds that help make Sushi Tadokoro a valued presence in San Diego dining, including prized Japanese imports. Chef Tadokoro tells me that, after an initial disruption, he’s able to get fish from Japan again, even if it costs him more to keep such things on the menu as iwashi (sardines), golden eye snapper, nodoguro (seaperch), and uni from Hokkaido.

There are benefits to dining in at Sushi Tadokoro — such as ordering a sweet and succulent black cod. But the truth is, we don’t all need to rush out to support local restaurants, just because they’re welcoming diners again. Our support is just as valuable — arguably more so — when we take it home. Even when it’s something special.

Comments
Sponsored

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

SD Symphony singer tells what it’s like behind the scenes

Conductor Payare even looks like Mahler
Next Article

Birdwatching bonanza, earliest sunset of the year, bulb planting time

Venus shines its brightest
Comments
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

This Week’s Reader This Week’s Reader