The Best Sushi in Pitt Meadows

Pitt Meadows has six sushi restaurants, by my count. There are just over nineteen thousand people living here, most of them packed into the residential strip in the south, and the rest of the municipality is farmland with very few people on it. Work that out per person and it is a strange number for a city this size.

Most of the best-of lists on this site are three or four entries long, because that is honestly how many there are. This one has the opposite problem. Sushi is the single most competitive restaurant category in Pitt Meadows, and the floor is higher than it has any right to be. I am not going to tell you one of these is worth a special drive, if that is what you are waiting to hear. What I can tell you is which one I would pick in which situation, which is the more useful question anyway.

Ranked by how often I actually end up there.

1. Akasaka Japanese Restaurant

The one I pick when it is a meal rather than a bag of food. Akasaka presents itself as a full Japanese restaurant rather than a takeout counter, and I order accordingly: sit down, take the time, look past the roll list. It is where I take people who are visiting and want to be fed properly, and it is the one I would book for a birthday where the group is mixed in age. Phone ahead if you are more than four.

2. Sango Sushi

My default for the large mixed order, which in practice is the order I place most often. Feeding a household where one person wants nothing raw, one wants only salmon and one changes their mind at the door is a logistics problem, not a dining decision. Sango is the one I trust to get a long, complicated list right and have it ready roughly when they said it would be. That reliability is worth more on a Tuesday than anything on a menu.

3. Kisoji Japanese Kitchen

The word kitchen in the name is doing real work. This is where I go when somebody in the group does not eat raw fish at all, because there is more to order than rolls and nobody has to sit there with a bowl of edamame pretending to be included. Ask what is cooked rather than scanning for it. It is also a reasonable lunch if you are already in that part of town and do not want a heavy afternoon.

4. Kabuki Sushi

The weeknight one. No deliberation, no group text about what everyone wants, just a decision made in the car on the way home. I have never had a bad experience there and I have also never planned an evening around it, which is not an insult. Every town needs the place you go when the alternative is cooking at nine at night.

5. Meadow Sushi

The small-order option. One person, one lunch, no occasion. This is the one I use when I am eating alone and do not want to be handed enough food for three, and it is the one I would suggest to someone who wants to try the category without committing to a family-sized order and a long wait.

And Sushi House Japanese Restaurant

The sixth, and the one I know least well, which is the honest thing to say rather than pretending otherwise. It has a set of people who go there and nowhere else, and they are not quiet about it. That kind of loyalty in a market with five direct competitors tells you something. Try it before you decide the list above is settled.

How to order

Phone the restaurant instead of using a delivery app. The order reaches the same kitchen either way, the app takes a cut from a small business that does not have much room to give one, and if something on your order is not available that day you find out in ten seconds instead of at the door. Some small restaurants close between lunch and dinner service, so check hours before you drive over rather than after.

Friday evening is the crunch at all six of these places at once. You will get your food faster, and the person handing it to you will be in a better mood, if you can order earlier or later than that. And if you have a strong opinion about which of these is genuinely the best, you are probably right, because in a category this crowded the differences come down to what you happen to order and how often you order it.