J Café / Sushi Burger

I used to work in the city, but after changing jobs last year, I’m stuck in St Kilda. The pocket of St Kilda where I work is not pretty. For one, there’s elephant sized dog poo everywhere, and there’s also the occasional person squatting in the gutter and taking a piss (yes that really happened, it was DURING THE DAY for goodness sake, and she was female. Super classy.). To make things even worse, the food options are severely limited. Argh! It really makes me pine for the city!

When I worked in the city, one place I used to visit at lunch time was Sushi Burger. Depending on your opinion, J Café/ Sushi Burger is either a bit of frivolous awesomeness, or a food abomination. Alastair and I fall into the first camp!

So what’s a sushi burger? It’s basically a sushi type filling sandwiched between two “buns” of sushi rice and wrapped in seaweed. Awesomeness or abomination? You decide!

Sushi Burger

On our last visit there, Alastair had a special sushi burger box ($17.50). There is a choice of meal and a choice of sushi burger. He chose the ebi for his meal (deep fried prawns) and for the sushi burger he had the spicy raw salmon.

The deep fried prawns were covered in panko and deep fried. He also received salad, rather a lot of mayo, mashed potato and a slice of orange. He offered to give me a prawn, but I declined even though they looked REALLY good! That’s love, I tell you.

Sushi Burger

I had a special noodle and sushi burger set ($17.50). For my noodles, I choose the buta soboro ramen – noodles in a soy based soup and topped with seasoned ground pork. I also had the spicy raw salmon sushi burger.

Sushi Burger

The sushi burgers were great – the “burger” filling were cubes of raw salmon seasoned with a small amount of chilli along with a bit of lettuce. It’s always a bit hard to bite through the seaweed that’s wrapped around the rice though.

Sushi Burger

My ramen noodles weren’t bad, but I found the pork topping too sweet. It really distracted me from the dish and it would’ve been better to be more savoury. Possibly too much mirin? It really was sweet – it was so strange.

Sushi BurgerSushi Burger

I also ordered a green tea smoothie. It was a bit expensive at $5.80. I saw them make it, and it was basically just a thin milkshake with a couple of spoons of green tea powder.

No visit to Sushi Burger is complete without eating a daifuku ($3/$3.50) – they make them on the premises and they’re rather good. The green tea and cream ones are particularly fab, though on this occasion we had a plain red bean one. I actually asked for black sesame, but it was lost in translation. Never mind – I love mochi, no matter what the filling!

I like Sushi Burger – it’s a bit silly, relatively inexpensive, and aside from my too sweet ramen, the food tastes good. Go for the sushi burgers, the daifuku, but not a green tea smoothie!

(Note: if you eat in there is a minimum charge of $12 per person.)

For more posts, see these blogs:

  • Frankly cross eyed
  • Foodie Central
  • The Culinary Club
  • Our Food Tales
  • Prililicious
  • See Smell Taste
  • Melbourne Dining Experiences
  • Am.I.Full
  • I Bought the City
  • Spoon, fork and chopsticks
  • Mel: Hot or Not
  • Ravenous Melbourne
  • Skinny Man, Big Appetite

  • J Café / Sushi Burger
    167 Exhibition Street
    Melbourne 3000
    Phone: 03 9650 9877
    Web: sushiburger.com.au

    [googleMap name=”J Cafe / Sushi Burger” width=”600″ height=”300″ directions_to=”false”]167 Exhibition Street, Melbourne[/googleMap]

    J Café Restaurant on Urbanspoon