You know how it goes. You’re out with your buddies early on a weekday evening, and everybody’s getting hungry and irritable. After ten minutes of the namby-pambies trying to decide on what to eat, having to take into consideration what everybody ‘feels like’ and what everyone has already eaten in the past two to three days, finally the group comes conclude that it’s sushi time. Oh yeah. You’re nearly starving, and so the prospect of eating anything is a ridiculous relief. You like sushi as much as the next kid— we’re all finally old enough to eat fish without grimacing and making faces — and while it can be on the pricey side, if you go to an all-you-can-eat place you make sure to get your money’s worth. Then you can make up for it later by not eating out another day— maybe you’ll finally have one of those five cans of Chunky™ Soup that have been in your cupboard since semester started. You’ve got it all figured out. Let’s sushi. Someone starts walking, suggesting to go to Generic Sushi Restaurant Ltd.
And then it comes. That one friend, with that one line:
“Ugh, no, their sushi isn’t good.”
It’s inevitable— you could list off every sushi place within a twenty kilometre radius, and that one damned friend will always shake their head in disappointment, will always know that their sushi isn’t good enough for them and their highly refined nautical palate. They love sushi. They’ve already tried all the sushi places. And apparently not a single one of them prepares sushi good enough to eat.
If you’re that friend and you are reading this now, please sit down. Let me tell you something. I don’t know if you are aware of this — I think you are, since you’re pretty smart— but we live in Canada. And not just anywhere in Canada— right in the middle of Ontario. We’re surrounded by corn farms and hockey rinks. Your sushi isn’t going to taste like it was kissed by sakura petals and serenaded by a koto as it flew out of Japan onto your plate. So just come off the whole sushi pretentiousness already. All of our sushi is going to taste like twenty different flavours of vanilla… metaphorically speaking. Unless you’ve been to Japan, ordered some $300 piece of blowfish sushi and cried about it afterwards, I really don’t think you have any credentials in terms of sushi connoisseurship. You aren’t that much more knowledgeable about sushi; you just complain more than the rest of us.
Now don’t worry, none of us hate you. You’re still fun to hang around and tell decent jokes on occasion, but next time we suggest a we go out for sushi, don’t give us that whole spiel about how the all-you-can-eat place two blocks away doesn’t have sufficiently edible sushi. Do like the rest of us: decide to eat at the closest sushi place and make jokes at the other friend who still doesn’t have chopsticks figured out while stuffing your face full of imitation crab and soy-sauce-drenched cylinders of rice and fish. You always end up doing that anyways, so save us the bellyaching (unless you actually ate that blowfish sushi. Then you should go see a doctor).
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