Sima Sushi

The torched-salmon roll is the move Sima Sushi has built a house style around. Love Love Salmon — spicy salmon inside, a second layer of torched salmon wrapped over the top — is the most direct expression of it, and the same flame finish recurs across the specialty page on rolls like Black Dragon, Double Torched Spicy, and the deep-fried K-Rock. The restaurant cooks a focused Japanese menu out of a small Princess Street dining room in downtown Kingston, opened in 2009 by a couple who built the place around sushi, sashimi, maki, and the cooked plates that round out the page, and have held the menu to roughly the same shape ever since.

Past the torched lane, the menu carries a tighter sushi-counter spine. The Red Dragon Roll sets salmon and avocado over a California-roll base; the Crispy Crunch Roll layers shrimp tempura, crabmeat, avocado, cucumber, spicy salmon, and a tempura crisp on a single piece; the Spicy Salmon Roll and Salmon & Avocado Roll cover the cleaner combinations a first-time table usually wants on the order; the Sashimi Dinner Deluxe is the fish-forward order for a quieter night. Lunch is a separate page. Service runs from eleven-thirty to two-thirty, with miso soup and green salad included alongside the sushi, sashimi, maki, and veggie maki lunch sets, and chicken and salmon teriyaki sit on the same page for the midday table that wants a cooked plate. Yam Tempura and the avocado-cucumber roll give vegetarian diners named anchors rather than improvised sides.

The pattern under that menu is restraint. Even the more elaborate special rolls keep to the same building blocks — torched salmon, layered named fillings, no fusion drift — and the lunch page makes the same call: a defined window, soup and salad included, sets cut from the standard sushi and maki vocabulary rather than the discount promotions a sushi room often runs to bring a daytime crowd. A thirty-piece takeout platter sits at the small end of the platter ladder, with forty-, fifty-, fifty-five-, and seventy-five-piece formats climbing up from there — enough off-premise scale to absorb a party order without forcing the dining room to redirect its night around one ticket. The room itself is cozy and downtown, the kind of small Princess Street address that fills on a Friday and keeps regulars walking back through the slower stretches.

The operating shape on the door follows the menu's restraint. The dining room runs Monday and Wednesday through Saturday from eleven-thirty in the morning to nine at night, closed Tuesday and Sunday, a five-day week that lets the kitchen hold the same prep rhythm through every service rather than chasing a seven-day cover. Lunch flows directly into dinner without a break, and the takeout menu codifies dine-in, take-out, delivery, and the platter ladder rather than treating off-premise as an afterthought. The everyday weekday demand from the rest of the city lands on the same schedule the dining room runs to, through an Uber Eats handoff that sits beside the in-house ordering.

What holds the place together across seventeen years on Princess Street is the size of the question Sima Sushi answers. It is a downtown Kingston sushi room that wants to feed a small table a focused Japanese menu — torched-salmon rolls when the order wants richness, a sashimi plate when the table wants the fish to read on its own, a lunch set with miso soup and green salad when the day is short, a take-out platter when the meal is happening somewhere else. The menu pages on the site still date from 2023, and the dish list hasn't needed a rewrite since.