On any given day, one of the busiest places in Reno is a strip mall near the airport. Most people are here to shop at Costco, which looms over the parking lot, and that’s especially true this time of year, in late summer, given how many people stock up at Costco during Burning Man. But there’s another essential stop in this shopping center that’s well known to Reno locals and longtime Burning Man attendees alike, and that’s Sushi Pier, one of Reno’s longest running all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants.
From the outside, the restaurant looks unremarkable — a tiny spot that, unless you knew what you were looking for, you’d easily skip past. But when I walked inside, the restaurant was busy with a lunch-hour rush. Almost every seat around the sushi bar was taken, and all but one or two tables were filled, too. Patrons were flipping through the sizable menu or taking bites of sushi.
The Backstreet Boys’ 1999 hit “I Want It That Way” played on the radio. It was around that same era that sushi finally made its way to Reno, the landlocked “biggest little city” in the desert.
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The exterior of Sushi Pier, an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant in Reno, Nev.
When Sushi Pier opened in 2000, it was among the first handful of restaurants to offer all-you-can-eat sushi in Reno, said owner Heejin Kim Polon. The price was $10.95 for lunch and $15.95 for dinner. At that time, Polon remembers there was a craze for sushi.
“It was so hugely successful right off the bat because sushi was very popular,” Polon said.
Now, more than 20 years later, Sushi Pier’s regulars are still sliding up to the counter. They know the deal — all-you-can-eat sushi is available for lunch and dinner. It includes appetizers like miso soup or mussels and, true to its name, as many pieces of nigiri or as many rolls as you want. But you have to eat what you order — no to-go boxes are given, and what you don’t eat, if it’s excessive, you’ll be charged for. The price has gone up gradually over Sushi Pier’s 24 years. The restaurant most recently raised prices in response to the pandemic, when inflation pushed up costs, and it now charges $25.95 for lunch and $32.95 for dinner. But it’s the same menu as always, more or less.
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Polon said that many of her customers have been eating here for decades — they’re all just a little bit older now. She told me how she ran into one customer who used to bring his kids in, and now those kids are in their 30s. Polon’s kids are also getting old enough to where they might soon be working in the restaurant.
All-you-can-eat sushi is a quintessential Reno experience. The city is full of all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants. At least 30 pop up when you search on Yelp. In fact, restaurant owners told me the industry has become so competitive, they can’t NOT do all-you-can-eat.
“Reno is an all-you-can-eat town,” Polon said.
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But that might be changing. Some restaurant owners say the way Reno does sushi is shifting alongside the city’s growth and changing demographics.
At Sushi Pier, I sat down at a table by the window. Because I wasn’t at the bar, I couldn’t order directly from the sushi chefs. Instead, I checked boxes next to the items I wanted on a long piece of paper that was double-sided to fit everything on the menu.
The first thing to understand about all-you-can-eat sushi is that it’s vastly different from........