Okinawa Sushi

The useful thing about Okinawa Sushi is what happens when a table can't agree. One person wants sashimi, another has been thinking about General Tao's Chicken since the drive over, and a third doesn't eat fish at all — and all three orders come off the same menu without anyone compromising. That breadth is the point of this east-side Owen Sound restaurant, which runs a Japanese sushi counter and a full pan-Asian kitchen side by side rather than choosing between them.

The sushi list carries the restaurant's name at its centre. The Okinawa Roll is the house maki, the one to order first if only to taste what the kitchen chose to sign, and it anchors a deep bench of rolls — the Dynamite Roll, the Red Dragon Roll, the Spider Roll, and a Chicken Teriyaki Roll for anyone who wants the wrap without the raw fish. Sashimi gets its own clean showcase in the Gold Sashimi Combo, built for a table that wants variety and portion over a long à la carte hunt. The Avocado Cucumber Roll and a Vegetarian Dragon Roll keep a named vegetarian path on the sushi side rather than leaving it to a plain fallback.

Then there are the sushi pizzas. Spicy crab and spicy salmon versions take the roll apart and rebuild it flat and shareable, and they are the clearest tell of the restaurant's playful streak — the item that explains why the menu feels broader and looser than a traditional sushi counter. The Red Dragon Roll and Spider Roll sit in a more familiar register, recognizable specialty-roll names doing recognizable work, which leaves the pizzas as the one genuine swerve rather than a whole menu straining to be clever. Alongside the Deep-Fried Cheese Wonton and Shrimp Tempura, they mark out a hot, hand-to-share appetizer lane running parallel to the raw-fish one.

Keep reading and the menu stops looking like a sushi menu at all. General Tao's Chicken, teriyaki, udon, lo mein, and pad Thai turn up beside the rolls, and the Thai and Chinese sections run long enough to carry a meal on their own. The range reads as a decision rather than an accident: a small-city kitchen built to be the place a whole group lands, not the one only the sushi crowd considers. It also gives dietary outliers somewhere to sit — Buttered Mushrooms and Zucchini and the vegetarian rolls for non-meat eaters, with gluten-free choices on the board for anyone who asks, though strict allergen needs are worth a direct call rather than an assumption.

The format is built to travel. The restaurant takes orders directly online, so the whole menu — rolls, appetizers, cooked mains, sauces, and party trays — can be planned for pickup or delivery in one pass, and those party trays make it a practical call when the order is for a crowd rather than a couple. Beer and wine are on hand for the dine-in table, and the hours run lunch straight through dinner every day. All of it suits a location near Heritage Place Mall on the city's east side, where the restaurant has been feeding the neighbourhood since 2018.

What Okinawa Sushi gives Owen Sound is optionality more than specialization. Plenty of towns its size have a sushi restaurant that does sushi and stops there; this one runs a Japanese counter, a Chinese kitchen, and a Thai menu off a single order screen, so a mixed table never has to split up to eat. The pricing stays moderate across all of it, which is part of why the menu works as a weeknight default and not just an occasion. Order the Okinawa Roll to see what the kitchen signs its name to, then let the person across the table order nothing like it.