Last year, it was tapas. This year, gourmet food trucks is what’s what. Fishlips Sushi is the latest contender on the food truck bandwagontruck.

On Tuesday, I saw that the truck was going to be stopped nearby my office, so I enlisted a co-worker to come with me and hunt the truck down. We arrived ten minutes after when the truck should have arrived, but it wasn’t in sight.  After looping around the block a few times, I was ready to give up before checking Twitter on my phone. Lo and behold, they tweeted that they were late, but on their way.  As it turned out, the truck was a few cars in back of mine waiting to make a left turn like me.

After giving the truck a few minutes to park and setup, I walked up to the ordering counter and ordered a Spicy Set ($8) off the Lunch Set menu which comes with a spicy tuna roll and a few pieces of temari sushi.  Unlike nigiri sushi, which is more rectangular, temari sushi is shaped into bite-sized spheres.

For those who are wondering why go to all the trouble of chasing down a sushi truck when one can just buy boxed sushi at the market, I’m happy to say that Fishlips makes all their orders fresh.  As the sign on their truck says, there’s a real sushi man inside! It took about ten minutes for my order to be ready.

The quality of the sushi was better than I expected. Because each piece is freshly made, they fell apart perfectly in my mouth and had none of that cold stale rice texture that a lot of market-bought sushi sets have.  There was too much rice in the spicy tuna rolls and I would have preferred less rice at the cost of overall size, but it certainly makes for a filling lunch for $8.  The spicy tuna filling was coarsely chopped, which I like, and had a good amount of heat, also great. (I hate when I order something spicy and it barely registers as warm on my tongue.)

The temari were the perfect size for eating in one mouthful and the fish was decent.  My favorite pieces were the eel and salmon.  The sauce on the eel  and tenderness of the piece were what really made it. I also had a bite of my co-worker’s crunchy roll and was surprised that the tempura inside was still crunchy!  It’s a good choice for people who can’t take the heat of a spicy tuna roll.

The sushi quality is a few steps above Mitsuwa’s sushi bentos and even some sit-down sushi restaurants I’ve been to, but don’t get me wrong, it’s still a very casual meal.  It’s not on par with the higher-tiered sushi restaurants. As long as people keep that in mind, they can’t be disappointed — especially considering almost everything is less than $10.

Fishlips Sushi is good enough that I’m rounding up more co-workers to join me next week when they get close again. I just wish they had an actual Culver City stop.  While I mainly wanted to try out the truck for sheer novelty, I’m happy to see that the food is actually decent.  It also helps that there’s no crazy 1 hour line for it like some other food truck.

Oh yeah, another plus: they take Visa and Mastercard as well as cash.

Fishlips Sushi
Fishlips Sushi Twitter