- Reno’s sushi restaurants offer endless, flamboyant rolls at budget-friendly prices, a city signature.
- The local all-you-can-eat sushi culture has birthed unique, Americanized creations often featuring creamy sauces.
- Rising food costs and tariffs threaten the sustainability of Reno’s beloved all-you-can-eat sushi model.
RENO, NEV. — The décor may be minimal at Hinoki Sushi, but the Godzilla rolls are endless.
Inside this Reno, Nevada, restaurant on a sunny Monday afternoon, platters of sushi streamed out of the kitchen like floats in a parade, each roll drizzled with pastel-hued sauces, confettied with furikake or crowned with haystacks of imitation crab. The Godzilla roll — a Reno special overflowing with whitefish, teriyaki sauce, hot sauce, spicy mayonnaise, green onions and sesame seeds, the whole thing deep-fried in tempura batter — graced almost every table. Diners dipped liberally into trays of ponzu, Cajun and honey-mustard sauces.
The price for this spread? $27.99 per person.
At a time when food prices remain bloated, tariffs threaten supply chains and the big casino-town buffet appears endangered — Reno has a thriving ecosystem of all-you-can-eat sushi that, for now, remains relatively inexpensive.
A City Signature: Limitless Sushi
Here in mountain-capped Reno — a kind of Las Vegas Lite, brimming with neon and a smattering of casinos, that serves as a stopover for many travelers to Lake Tahoe — nearly all of the 50 or so sushi restaurants are all-you-can-eat. Limitless sushi has become such a given that à la carte sushi restaurants rarely survive beyond a year, said Mike Higdon, a local food writer and photographer…