Sushi Star

Sit a divided table down at Sushi Star and the argument settles itself. One person wants raw fish, another wants something fried, a third wants the novelty plate nobody can name yet — and the menu is long enough to give all three what they came for without anyone compromising. This is an all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant on King Street East in Kitchener, near Fairview Park, where breadth is the whole idea: more than three hundred items spanning cold sushi and sashimi, rolls, skewers, tempura, teriyaki, bento boxes, and sushi pizzas. Lunch and dinner each carry their own pricing, and the meal arrives round by round rather than all at once.

The rolls are where the kitchen shows its hand. The Fire Dragon Roll stacks shrimp tempura, crabmeat, avocado, and cucumber, then finishes the whole thing with salmon, flying fish egg, and a house sauce; the Super Star Hand Roll folds BBQ eel, salmon, avocado, and tobiko into a single cone. A house dragon family runs the length of the case — black under a shingle of eel, red under salmon, green under avocado — and the signature rolls keep going past it, from the mango-wrapped Angel Roll to the tempura-yam Honey Star. The raw side holds its own, with thick-cut salmon sashimi and a twenty-piece sashimi boat carrying salmon, white tuna, red snapper, surf clam, and crab.

What sets the kitchen apart is how readily it runs hot alongside cold. The same order that opens on sashimi can pick up golden shrimp skewers, takoyaki, a chicken teriyaki bento, or a salmon sushi pizza built on a crisped-rice base with tobiko and sesame — cooked comfort sharing the table with the raw selections rather than waiting politely behind them. The breadth isn't scattered; it's arranged so a group can keep moving through registers without repeating itself. And the kitchen isn't precious about where that range ends: dessert can be green tea mochi or a deep-fried Mars Bar, and both arrive without apology.

The menu is also packaged for the table that would rather not negotiate every plate. Combination sets do the deciding — the Sushi Star Set runs sashimi, sushi, and flying-fish-egg rolls with miso soup and seaweed salad; the Deluxe Sushi Set adds eight kinds of sushi to a salmon-avocado roll and a spicy salmon hand roll; the Salmon Lover Set keeps a single fish across sashimi, sushi, and two rolls. The bento boxes go further, arriving as a full meal in one lid — chicken teriyaki or beef short rib alongside miso soup, seaweed salad, salmon sashimi, a California roll, spring rolls, and steamed rice. And when the occasion leaves the building, the house party tray carries the same range out the door — sixty-four pieces of black, red, green, and fire dragon rolls, built for a crowd.

Sushi Star is built to hold all of this. The restaurant opened in 2004 — a second location for the name — and works out of a modern, roughly three-thousand-square-foot dining room laid out for groups and for the longer sittings the all-you-can-eat format invites. The pacing is deliberate: a ninety-minute seating, posted last calls, and a charge for excessive leftovers that nudges a table toward ordering only what it will finish. Plates land fast once the orders go in, which is how a table works through several rounds inside the window. Evenings fill, so booking ahead comes recommended, and the shared surface lot out front keeps arrival simple for a carful.

Two decades in, Sushi Star runs on the premise it opened with: a menu wide enough that a table never has to settle for one thing. The novelty plates keep the regulars curious; the thick-cut salmon sashimi is what they come back for. The breadth is the point, and the ninety-minute clock is what keeps it from sliding into a free-for-all.