Forked River House, Forked River NJ

There’s something fishy about Sushi in a sports bar but what the heck, I’m feeling adventurous. Someone recently told me I should check out the half price Sushi at the Forked River House on Monday nights, so with the Memorial weekend coming to a close , I traded the idea of a burger for a dish of raw fish.

Not to be confused with the Sushi we were served!

Welcome to my Sushi disaster! Arriving to find only one table filled in a Sushi bar is a scary thing because Sushi places need to be busy to insure the fish is fresh. Not wanting to spend the night visiting the toilet, and feeling good to go as I am armed with a friends recommendation of good Sushi, we venture forward to try our luck.

Well as luck would have it we experienced some bad and some good as the evening progressed. After checking out both the half price Sushi menu and the regular Sushi menu we chose to try the peppered Tuna salad for an app and then the Spicy Tuna roll, The Dragon roll and the Spider Crab roll.

Bad luck encounter number 1 would be a peppered Tuna salad minus the salad. Eight thin slices of peppered Tuna with a scoop of seaweed drizzled with a soy dressing appeared to be missing something which later turned out to be the greens, as we were served the wrong dish. Good luck encounter number 1, would be that our waitress, who at first seemed to be in a daze, brought us the requested ginger and extra seaweed to make up for the mistake which when adding the ginger made the dish quite tasty. Score if your keeping it, 1-1.

Moving on….The rolls arrived, dressed quite casually I might add, as compared to some places that are very fancily prepared, but none the less looking good enough to eat. The Spider roll in fact was pretty cool looking with the large pieces of fried soft shell crab stretching to the ceiling from inside the roll. Tada..bad encounter number 2, wheres the Eel???? Dragon roll should have eel inside, so we question our waitress who still seems a bit out of it, and as we discuss the missing eel, my wife takes apart the roll to find a tiny morsel of eel well hidden beneath the layer of rice and avocado. Good luck encounter number 2, when our waitress offers us a complimentary roll to make up for the MIA eel. Nice job on the customer service side. After discussing back and forth with my wife, we opt to pass on the new roll but our waitress, and here it comes, good luck encounter number 3, offers my wife a serving of dessert for our trouble. As the dessert offered was a chocolate cake, it kind of made up for the mess as far as my wife is concerned. Chocolate cake can make a bad day a good one so why not turn a fishy evening sinfully sweet. Score 3-2 in our favor.

Allie ( I hope my wife recalls the spelling correctly), our waitress, turned what could have been a reason to not return into a reason to give this establishment a second chance. Although she seemed completely frazzled all evening, we did find out later, that she has been working three jobs and hasn’t had a day off in about a week. Even with being tired, she tried extremely hard to make up for all the mistakes that occurred. We assured her that we didn’t blame her for the mishaps and thanked her for being so responsive to our needs and trying to make up for the problems that weren’t her fault.

All in all I probably won’t return for Sushi anytime soon but I will return to try a Mexican Burger because I saw one go by and it made me wonder what the hell was I thinking eating Sushi on Memorial day. I should have had the burger. Anyway, Allie assured us that the burgers are really good and told us to come back any night but Wednesdays to see her again! Good job Allie and get some sleep will ya!

The Regular Guy Rating

Sushi * *       Allie ****