2 restaurants for cheap eats

As we wind down our days living uptown, the combination of wanting to try things we never got to and a total lack of time has us eating out quite a bit. And our looming huge mortgage has us looking to save a penny or two even when we're too lazy to cook. Recently, Belltown's Toi and Lower Queen Anne's Marinepolis Sushi Land fit the bill.

Toi lured us in with their 'Blue-Eyed Devil' all-Monday night happy hour. Why we always fall for the happy hour thing, I don't know. Happy hours are never really that great of a deal and you end up ordering off a limited menu and missing some of the best things the restaurant has to offer. Toi's happy hour was typical -- they even have the classic happy hour menu item that is a 1/2 serving of a regular entree at the low, low price of 1/2 the regular entree! We'll let you figure it out. We did better when we happily abandoned happy hour and ordered a bowl of the spicy tom ka soup and blew away all of our happy hour value with a 10 buck Grey Goose martini. So much for being cheap.

Meanwhile, cheap is the best thing going for Sushi Land -- it is definitely a low-priced option for kaiten sushi action. With the cheapest plates at $1 a pop, the neverending flow of kaiten boats is a fun way to get stuffed. But you definitely get what you pay for. We usually joust each other with our chop sticks for the last bites of unagi -- but it turns out we've been eating at fancy-pants sushi joints with good unagi. The stuff at Sushi Land was mealy and flavorless. Better were the simple preparations like the spicy tuna or California rolls. You can get the full scoop on Marinepolis SL over at SushiFinder.com -- you'll also see a note or two over there mentioning some problems with the health department. The concerns are legit -- you can see for yourself over on the King County Health web site. There were some major issues last year and some problems as recently as this October. But this kind of thing comes up with lots of restaurants -- people just tend to think about it a lot more when it comes to eating boats of raw fish. Um, yum?

BTW, to be fair, here are Toi's inspection notes -- no such issues there. Still, the next time we're feeling cheap, we'll take our chances with Sushi Land.

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, restaurants, toi, sushiland