All You Can Eat Sushi Mount Prospect, Is e Sushi Worth It?

Updated August 2026. Dinner for two, Friday night, 1750 West Golf Road. The bill is at the bottom.

We had been talking about e Sushi for a few nights before we went. Not planning it, exactly. Just the way a place comes up when you have been somewhere three or four times over the years and you start wondering whether it is still the place you remember. So on Friday night Vika and I left the kids at home and drove over to Golf Road to find out.

The answer, mostly, is yes. But it costs three dollars a head more than the last price we saw, one of the rolls was the worst thing either of us ate all month, and there is a rule printed on the table card that you want to read before you order a single thing.

This is the first all you can eat review on this site. Every other sushi place we have written up around here, Deba down the road in the same town, Tekka in Elk Grove Village, Ari in Des Plaines, Shakou in Arlington Heights, Sensei in Palatine, and Sushi Plus Rotary in the city, has been ordered off a normal menu, one plate at a time. This one is different, and the difference is most of the story.

The room is nicer than the strip mall suggests

e Sushi sits in a brick strip mall on West Golf Road, in among a medical office, a couple of small shops and a few other small restaurants. From the outside it reads like every other suburban storefront. Inside it is a clear step above a hole in the wall.

There is a wall of polished metal fish swimming along the banquette, lit from underneath so the light shifts pink and violet across the paint. A cherry blossom branch runs the length of the black ceiling. There is a Hokusai wave on one wall and exposed brick on another and the sushi bar sits along the back with the fish case lit up behind glass.

And playing over all of it, the whole night, instrumental elevator covers of nineteen eighties and nineties love songs. Not the originals. The soft instrumental versions. It is a very specific choice and I would not change it.

It is not a date night room. It is not trying to be. It is bright, it is clean, it is loud enough that nobody notices your table, and it is exactly the kind of place you can bring kids without apologising to anyone. Josh used to eat here back when his entire order was a California roll plus shumai or gyoza, and he never once complained about it.

How the all you can eat menu works here

You are not going up to a buffet line. Nobody is walking around with a tray.

You get a pink paper sheet, a pencil, and a printed list of everything that is included, appetizers and soups and salads down the top, then maki rolls, then nigiri, then side sashimi. You write your name at the top, tick what you want, hand it over, and a few minutes later it arrives. When you want more, you tick a new sheet. We went through three of them.

A few rules are printed right on the sheet and they genuinely change how you order:

• Sashimi is tied to rolls. Two pieces per roll ordered, and the sheet says it plainly: “Sashimi lover must order roll to choose sashimi (per ticket)” and “Roll & sashimi must be ordered on same sheet. Separate order not allowed.” So if you want a pile of sashimi, you order rolls to earn it. That is not a complaint, it is just something worth knowing before you sit down expecting a sashimi dinner.
• Groups of five or more get an automatic eighteen percent gratuity. Family of four plus a grandparent, that is you.
• Mochi ice cream is a dollar extra, and the legend at the bottom of the sheet flags a heart symbol as another dollar add on. Everything else is included.

The tea is not included either, which surprised me a little. It is a dollar fifty and it is fine. It tasted like green tea. Warm green tea. That is genuinely everything I have to say about the green tea.

The two salads we both regretted

We started with two salads and we would take both of them back.

The octopus salad tasted like the seafood salad you buy in a plastic tub at the grocery store. Sliced seafood with wood ear mushroom, green pepper, onion and sesame in a light chilli oil dressing, sitting on shredded iceberg. It was not bad. It was just not necessary. Vika had two bites, called it mid, and left the rest to me, and she went further than that: the little tubs at the store are often better than this. I ate the rest of it, which tells you it was perfectly edible and not a great deal more.

The spicy kani salad is the one that actually annoyed us, because this is a dish we both like and we order it almost everywhere we go. Vika especially. She has a read on it across probably twenty restaurants and she knows within a bite when it is off.

The problem was temperature. It was not cold. Not warm, just not cold, and the lettuce underneath was not cold either, which tells you it had not come out of a fridge. It landed on the table within a minute or two of us handing over the ticket, while the octopus salad came out properly chilled. Our read is that the kani salad gets mixed ahead of service and left sitting out.

Then the crunch. There was far too much of it, and it had gone completely soft, absorbed into the dressing. Crunch is supposed to bring two things, texture and that fried breading flavour, and this brought neither. It was just there. The better places we go to hold the crunch back and throw it on at the pass, on the way out to the table, so it is still crisp when it hits you. Vika also wanted more spicy mayo in it and missed the masago, which she says should be in there.

She is right about the crunch, and this is where she and I part ways. To her it is filler no matter what. I would not go as far as calling it the best part of the salad, but done properly I like what it brings, the texture and the flavour both.

The Fire Dragon roll was the best thing all night, and neither of us saw it coming

Here is the thing about the Fire Dragon roll: neither of us orders baked rolls. Ever. It is a whole category we skip. When it came out and it was clearly baked, I remember thinking, well, alright, we will see.

It was excellent.

Shrimp tempura, cream cheese and avocado on the inside. Salmon and white tuna laid over the top. Eel sauce and spicy mayo across all of it, baked together until the top goes glossy and the cream cheese inside has gone soft and warm. A scatter of green onion over the top.

That warm, half melted cream cheese is what made it. I would order it again tomorrow. And the honest tell that we both liked it more than we expected: when the pieces were gone, we were both picking at the sauce soaked rice left on the plate. We normally push that rice aside.

Vika had one complaint, which is that the shrimp tempura inside was slightly overdone and came out a little chewy. I disagreed with her at the time and I still do. I liked that texture. Take your pick, we are two people and we ate the same roll.

The Sakura roll is the clean one

Vika deliberately ordered rolls that do not show up on a Sushi Para menu, which is its own kind of research.

The Sakura is eight pieces, crab and avocado inside, wrapped in pink soy paper, spicy salmon over the top, and nothing drizzled on it at all. After the Fire Dragon it read clean and fresh. The avocado was properly green and firm without being one of those underripe avocados that fights you.

Vika’s note: the ratio was off. She put it at about one part crab to three parts avocado and she wanted it closer to even. I liked the freshness of it and did not mind, but she orders more sushi than I do and she is usually right about ratios.

The Volcano roll tastes exactly like Sushi Para’s

This is the one that started the conversation we spent the drive home having.

The Volcano is eight pieces, rice on the outside, spicy tuna through the middle, dusted with orange tobiko and black and white sesame, with a bead of dark red sauce set on each piece. It was on point. Perfect, and I do not hand that word out.

And it tasted exactly like the Volcano at Sushi Para. Not similar. The same roll. Which is probably a large part of why we love it, and it is the first place the resemblance really landed for us.

The only knock is that the last pieces of it came out heavier on rice than the first ones did. That is the entire complaint.

The Philadelphia hand roll is the one to skip

We ordered the Philadelphia as a hand roll, which is worth saying because we cannot speak for the cut roll version.

It was a bust.

The salmon in it is smoked rather than fresh, which we knew going in. We have had plenty of Philly rolls made with smoked salmon and they are usually fine. This one was over smoked, very salty, and the texture had gone hard and flaky rather than silky. Even the spicy mayo could not save it, and their spicy mayo can save a lot.

If I had been paying by the roll, this is the one I would have sent back. Skip it.

The spicy salmon gunkan is the reason to go back

The single best value on that sheet, for me, is the spicy salmon gunkan. It is not even close.

Minced salmon, not chopped, mounded up on rice in a nori collar. I ordered it on every single ticket. If you told me I could go back to e Sushi and order nothing but a plate of those, I would take that deal.

The spicy tuna is very good too, and it tastes remarkably like the spicy tuna at Sushi Taku in the city. Same thing again: minced rather than chopped. That is my texture preference and it is the whole reason both of these land for me. A lot of places roughly chop the fish and stir sriracha through it and you get chunks. Minced gives you something closer to a spread, and it sits on the rice properly.

My one wish is that they used their own spicy mayo in the spicy salmon instead of what tastes like straight sriracha. More on the mayo in a second.

Vika was much cooler on both. Pretty good, she said. One of each was enough and she did not go back for more. She also had a round of crab, masago and egg nigiri, and her verdict there was that they were all perfectly decent and none of them were memorable. Her words: she could have skipped them, the order was already big enough.

The sashimi is where the quality shows, in both directions

The eel and the squid were fantastic, both of them, and they are what to spend your roll allowance on.

The salmon was the weakest thing we ate all night, and it is worth being specific about why, because “the salmon was not great” is not useful to anybody. There was no visible marbling on it. At a Tensuke or a Tsukasa you can see the fat running through the slice, those pale layers, and the piece comes up firm when you lift it. This came up floppy. It reminded me of the salmon you buy at Costco to grill, which is not an insult, it is just a different grade of fish for a different job.

Not bad. Just not high grade. Both of us would have traded the salmon for another piece of eel or squid.

The way I said it in the car afterwards, and I will stand behind it: this is not the discount rack of the fish aisle, and it is not the premium rack. It is the target rack.

On rice, since it is the usual complaint with all you can eat: they are not over ricing here. The spicy tuna and spicy salmon pieces were maybe a touch heavy, and the tail end of the Volcano came out heavier than the front of it did. That is the whole list. Across three tickets nothing else was padded out and no roll felt bulked up to slow us down.

The spicy mayo is identical to Sushi Para’s, and that is the whole point

Sushi Para was our go to sushi restaurant for years. We went to all the Chicago locations, and I ate at the Washington DC one before it closed. The Chicago ones are gone now. Palatine is still open.

Their spicy mayo is my favourite spicy mayo anywhere, and it is not close. It is a dressing style spicy mayo, thinner and more emulsified, and it carries actual flavour. Most sushi places do not make anything like it. Most places, when they build a spicy tuna, squeeze in straight sriracha and a little Japanese mayonnaise, stir, done.

e Sushi’s spicy mayo is effectively the same sauce. Put the two side by side and I do not believe I could tell you which was which on look, on flavour, or on consistency.

And it is not just the sauce. The Volcano is the same roll we used to order at Sushi Para, and a lot of the rest of the menu reads Sushi Para-ish more generally. That resemblance is what set the whole conversation off in the first place.

For the record, my ranking: Sushi Para first. Tensuke a very close second, and honestly on some days I prefer it, because it is a completely different flavour with a good consistency. Tsukasa is good and different again.

What happens if you do not finish your all you can eat sushi?

You get charged for it, and at e Sushi the amounts are printed on a card sitting on your table:

• One dollar per piece for appetizers, nigiri, sashimi and signature rolls
• Fifty cents per piece for regular rolls and nigiri rice portions

The order sheet says the same thing in different words: “Please order as much as you can finish. All unfinished food will be charged to bill at full or prorated menu price.”

Nobody hassled us about it and we did not leave anything, so we cannot tell you how strictly it gets enforced. But it is printed, it is itemised, and it explicitly covers the rice you leave behind on a nigiri, which is the thing people actually get caught by. Order in small rounds and you will never think about it again.

Is all you can eat sushi a good idea with kids?

At this place, yes, with one caveat.

The sheet has a real cooked section, not a token one. Gyoza, shumai, harumaki, crab rangoon, edamame, fried shrimp, fried calamari, takoyaki, yakitori, jalapeño bombs, shrimp tempura, which comes as one shrimp plus three vegetable pieces, and miso soup. A kid who does not eat raw fish can eat very well here off nothing but that column, plus a California roll, plus a sweet potato or cucumber roll. That was Josh’s entire order here for years.

The caveat is the leftover charge. A nine year old’s eyes are bigger than their stomach and the charge does apply to the rice they abandon. The fix is the same as it is for adults, which is to order in small rounds and tick the next sheet when the plate is clear.

Worth knowing: parties of five or more get eighteen percent gratuity added automatically.

What we would order, and what we would skip

Order:

• The Fire Dragon roll, even if you never order baked rolls
• The Volcano roll
• The spicy salmon gunkan, repeatedly
• The spicy tuna
• Eel and squid sashimi

Skip:

• The Philadelphia hand roll
• Both salads, the octopus one and the spicy kani
• The salmon sashimi, and put those two pieces toward more eel

What dinner for two actually cost

Here is the receipt, and here is the part that stuck with us.

Before we walked in, we looked the place up. A photo somebody had posted on the Google listing still shows all you can eat dinner at $25.95. At the door it was $28.95.

So dinner for two at e Sushi, with a pot of tea and no alcohol, is $66.08.

Three dollars a head does not sound like much until you run it. At the old price the same check would have come to $59.41. The increase cost us $6.67 on the night, on a menu that as far as we can tell has not changed. That is annoying. It is not a dealbreaker.

For context, most all you can eat sushi dinners in the city sit around twenty one to twenty two dollars, and the well known ones top out around twenty six. At $28.95 e Sushi is asking a premium for the format. Whether you think that premium is fair probably comes down to whether you are ordering the spicy salmon gunkan on repeat or filling up on salads.

If you do want a drink, the bar is cheap and we should say what is on it even though we only had tea. Bottled beer is $3.50 across the board, Miller Lite, Heineken, Sapporo, Kirin and Asahi. Sixteen ounce pours of the Sapporo, Kirin and Asahi are $6.50. Sake bottles run $5.50 to $8.95, or $3.95 for a four ounce pour of the Fuji, served chilled or hot. There is an $8.85 sparkling and a $9.95 plum wine on there too.

Is all you can eat sushi worth it at e Sushi?

Yes. With a shopping list.

We would come back here without hesitating and we would tell a friend to go. What it is not is the place we will be returning to every two or three weeks, and the honest reason is that the ceiling is not quite high enough for that. The salmon tells you where the fish sits on the shelf. The salads tell you the kitchen is not fussing over the small stuff. But the spicy mayo is genuinely as good as our all time favourite, the Volcano is the same roll we used to drive to Sushi Para for, the gunkan are excellent, the eel and the squid are better than they need to be at this price, and a baked roll that neither of us would normally order turned out to be the best thing on the table.

Go, order in small rounds, spend your roll allowance on eel and squid, get the Fire Dragon and the Volcano, and keep ordering the spicy salmon gunkan until somebody stops you.

Just do not order the Philly.

e Sushi, Mount Prospect: location and hours

Address: 1750 West Golf Road, Mount Prospect, IL 60056

Phone: (224) 875-7133

Online: esushimountprospect.com

Walk ins: welcome

All you can eat dinner is $28.95 per person. Lunch appears to be a la carte rather than all you can eat, with a three roll lunch special at $17, combos from $13 to $18, and signature roll lunches at $22 and $32, so check before you go if lunch is what you are after.

More sushi around the northwest suburbs: Deba in Mount Prospect, Tekka in Elk Grove Village, Ari in Des Plaines, Shakou in Arlington Heights, Sushi Plus Thai by Sensei in Palatine, and Sushi Plus Rotary in the city.