Sushi at the Intercontinental Hotel Guatemala City

One of the best kept secrets in Guatemala City is the Sushi restaurant off the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel. Anyone who has visited Guatemala City will know that it's a hard city to get a handle on and most tourists stick to Zona 10 where the better hotels, restaurants, entertainment and embassies are located. It can be a rough and dangerous town, but in this quarter you are pretty safe. However, very late at night I would not advise tourists to be wandering around sightseeing even in Zona 10. Yolkobsens stumbled on the Tanoshii Sushi Bar & "Cocina Japonesa" while out looking for a lunch place. We love Guatemalan food, but like a lot of North Americans who've lived in big cities we have an instilled hunger for variety in our food, particularly international cuisine. We were delighted when we found Tanoshii's after stopping to admire the Efrain Recinos mural on the wall of the Intercontinental Hotel at 14 Calle 2-51. Cross the lobby and you will find yourself in a very impressive and reasonably priced Sushi restaurant. I have a particular fondness for teriyaki-roasted eel, while Mr. Y has a real thing for quail eggs complemented with fish roe. Lots of fresh-water eel for me, but no quail eggs for him. That was the only glitch in an otherwise fantastic Guatemala City lunch. We ate and drank for about 2 hours, taking our time, letting the Sake and beer melt away our tourist plans for the day. We set aside our agenda, which included a trip to the famous Guatemala City sinkhole (okay, we're crass, but curious) and the Museum of the National Palace. Instead we concentrated on sampling fat tuna belly (another personal favourite), a sashimi selection that went on for blocks, caterpillar California style sushi and almost the entire menu of nigiri-zushi. Such a meal in Toronto, Chicago or other North American city would have rung in at the $250 US range (remember we had a lot of Sake). Instead, the bill came to about $125. Okay, so it was a lot more than we thought we would pay for yet another plate of "plata tipica," but we were happy sleeping off lunch and not thinking about anything but when we would return to Tanoshii's.