Ootoro Sushi

For more than a decade, Ootoro Sushi has been one of Orange County’s highest-end Japanese restaurants – though Taiwanese-owned, authentically Japanese enough in most regards to cultivate a dedicated following and command prices inconceivable at other local sushi places. Located in the same Irvine plaza as Trade Food Hall, the roughly 50-seat restaurant is open only Tuesdays through Saturdays for lunch and dinner service (minus a daily break from 2:30pm to 5:30pm), using multiple benches to allow groups of customers to wait for tables before and during regular hours. While Ootoro has neither a dress code nor fine dining-caliber service, it posts a menu outside to gently discourage price-conscious guests, deliberately leading with higher-priced options. The implicit message is “only add your name to our waiting list if you’re prepared to wait a while and pay for a premium-quality experience.”

It’s worth noting that Ootoro Sushi didn’t magically appear out of nowhere; it’s part of a small chain. The original Walnut, CA location opened in 2012, and was subsequently followed by Irvine and Little Tokyo restaurants in 2016 and 2020. A Tustin sister concept called Ootoro Bar opened in 2024, offering separate Sugarfish / KazuNori sushi and hand roll experiences at more affordable prices. Chosen right as demand for sushi-grade tuna was peaking, the Ootoro name references the once ultra-desirable, premium-priced and fatty underbelly of a bluefin tuna, and its spelling alternates between “ootoro” on marketing materials to “otoro” on signage. This difference is attributable to confusing romanization and pronunciation of the long ō – said like “oh,” not “ooo,” despite the way it reads.

Ootoro Sushi is largely known for high-end omakase (trust the chef) sushi experiences that start at $150 per person for lunch or $185 for dinner, with Shiki ($250) and Chef’s Menu ($300 to $500, minimum 2 people) tiers above that. When asked, servers promise only that the entry-level dinner option includes seven to nine courses, with “more dishes” and “more premium fish” if you step up. But these aren’t the restaurant’s only options: It’s possible to dine at Ootoro for around $30 per person, particularly but not exclusively earlier in the day, when “lunch combos” are offered for $31, though an all-day a la carte menu includes handfuls of sub-$20 small plates.

Given all these notes about pricing, you might be asking at this point whether you should go here or just seek out one of hundreds of local Japanese options with less expensive sushi. The answer depends mostly on your pocketbook and secondarily on whether you’re celebrating a special occasion; your need for purely traditional Japanese preparations should rank a distant third, and the size of your appetite fourth. But as noted above, if Ootoro’s menu prices strike you at this point as a deterrent, the easiest choice is to go elsewhere.

If you want to go down the “inexpensive” path, you can order a mixed chirashi or sashimi and rice bowl ($25 to $29/lunch, $31/dinner) and have a single but substantial meal. One member of our group ordered a salmon ikura bowl ($31) without any specific expectations, and found it beautifully appointed: a bed of rice fully covered by roughly ten thick slices of fresh, glistening salmon, two spoonfuls of similarly shiny ikura, and spoon-sized dollops of omelette, minced fish, and seaweed. Apart from unwanted wasabi – left on top but touching the fish and rice – this bowl was wonderfully flavored, filling, and packed with high-quality ingredients, rivaling versions we’ve enjoyed at Fountain Valley’s Sushi Koto. Any guest with a modest appetite could leave Ootoro without ordering more.

Like the paper menu outside, the tableside menu’s two narrow pages of a la carte choices emphasize premium options first. One page starts with $280 certified Kobe steak entrees, while the other spotlights caviar-topped oysters ($75), wagyu and seafood hot pots ($99), seafood tempura ($46), various fried rices ($43 to $48), and toro tartar with truffle ($43). Mixed into each page are the aforementioned sub-$20 small plates, many but not all deep fried: clam ginger soup ($7.50 to $17), fried shrimp skewers ($9/4 shrimp), tempura sea bass or crab hand rolls ($18/2 rolls), and black cod tempura ($19), to name a handful.

Just to get a sense of what some of these dishes were like, we ordered a couple: Two soft shell crab hand rolls arrived overflowing with crispy crab, and fried squid leg ($13) was a perfectly seasoned plate of small, golden battered squid pieces that was at least on par with the best calamari we’ve had locally. So in our experience, Ootoro’s less expensive dishes don’t compromise on quality.