Featured photo: A sushi roll from Ichigo Sushi in Bossier City.
If you’ve ever eaten Chinese take-out in Shreveport or Bossier City, you may have met Sky Lin. Lin has operated a handful of Chinese restaurants around town. 20×49.com once profiled him (in this blog post, “The Nicest Guy to Ever Work a Wok”) as one of the most exuberant, friendly restaurateurs in the city. His newest restaurant, Ichigo Sushi (2091 Stockwell Road, Suite #14, Bossier City), brings very affordable sushi, sashimi and popular Japanese-style food (udon noodle bowls, bento boxes, etc.) to the Bossier/Haughton area. Since the sushi bar is an expansion of Lin’s existing Chinese take-out spot, diners can also order from a gigantic Chinese menu. All told, I’d guess that the combined menu of both places comprises several hundred items.
Lin opened Ichigo Sushi in July of 2016 with the assistance of a childhood friend and sushi chef who moved to Bossier City from Manhattan. While much of the menu is in keeping with what you’d expect from similar restaurants, there are some unusual menu items at Ichigo Sushi. My favorite thing that I ate there was a hand roll made not with the usual chewy seaweed wrapper but with an edible paper wrapper. It seems a little odd to write up an edible wrapper, but it made the dish better. I also enjoyed an appetizer called yellowtail jalapeño, which was made famous in a New York City sushi restaurant called Nobu and has since become very commonplace on sushi menus around the country – but the Ichigo version was uncommonly good (and attractive!). I sat at the sushi bar and watched as dish after dish came out, and everything that I saw looked as though it were put together with a great deal of care and attention.
“Sushi’s not just food,” Lin told me when I asked about the look of Ichigo’s sushi. “Sushi is art.”
If you love local eats, check out the Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau’s new brochure, Eat Here: A Food Lover’s Guide to Shreveport-Bossier.
If you’re reading this in October of 2016, visit www.318RestaurantWeek.com to learn more about Shreveport’s first-ever Restaurant Week and sign up for a great giveaway.
“Like” Ichigo Sushi’s page on Facebook for food photos and the occasional pun.
