Rise Asian Sushi on SW 18th

People kept telling us about Rise Asian Sushi so we had to try it. The restaurant is in Village Tower Shoppes with Howard’s Market, on the north side of SW 18th between Powerline and Military Trail – across from Outback and Coldstone Creamery. In the image below it’s in the corner maybe 1/3 in from the left. We recently wrote about Fabien’s Bistro in the same plaza.
fabien-plaza-wide
We heard this was the best sushi in Boca Raton. We liked it, but it’s hard for us to say it’s better than other places we like.
It’s nothing special on the outside though certainly not bad:
rise-exterior
On the inside there’s a sushi bar but no one sat there. And there are plenty of tables.
rise-sushi-bar
rise-interior
One thing I did like is that they have udon noodle soups on the menu. I had one of those as a starter and did like it. It was not quite authentic – true udon noodles are fatter, and should be served with togarashi, a spicy Japanese red pepper powder. But that’s really picky. The soup tasted good and the shrimp were nice.
Please note that my food photos did not come out well for some reason, possibly lighting or camera problems. All the food items looked just fine.
udon-shrimp
My companion had salmon teriyaki with white rice. Being picky again, the rice was not a true Japanese rice. But the rice was okay and the salmon dish was good – my companion ate it up.
salmon-teriyaki
I had the sushi and sashimi lunch. It was good but not great. Sashimi is the true test of a sushi place. You can hide lower quality fish in a roll with cream cheese, avocado and other things. It’s very hard to hide it in sashimi. Three of the four types of sashimi were very good. The fourth had a hint of not being fresh. It wasn’t bad, but just not as good as the rest.
The lunch came with a spicy tuna roll. This was better quality than most spicy tuna rolls – the chunks of fish were larger and that suggests better quality maguro to me.
sushi-sashimi-lunch
Both lunches came with salads and they were larger than what we usually see from sushi places.
We liked it and certainly would say it’s worth a try for any of our readers who like sushi. But it’s at the southeast corner of West Boca and we live far west. It’s not any better than Boon’s in Boca Greens, which is a lot closer for us. We’re still hooked on Jidai Kaiten Sushi’s lunch deal, and Rise isn’t going to take us away from that.