Welcome to the blog called mmm-yoso. Despite the fact that it is an Asian restaurant, Kirk is not blogging about it; Cathy is. It’s OK. She knows if food is good or bad.
Hi again. A few people told me about this sushi place near SDSU, and that I should try it. I didn’t think about the name of it. The Mister and I went there for lunch the other day…I saw the name was Tokyo Sushi Loha…sounded…well…heck, I had blogged about Tokyo in El Cajon, and remember one comment, from Mike, who said he went to Tokyo all the time and their sushi had the best prices in town…and well, if you read that post, you can see it was part of my string of bad meals (and actually, generally bad days) I was having back in February. It came full circle when I was eating in this lovely restaurant. 
I really think Mike was talking about this place, which is on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego and not in El Cajon. This place is good. The sushi bar is very large and always busy.
As you can see from the menu (click on any photo and it enlarges) they have lunch specials, a variety of items for dinner and sushi and rolls.
There are only 13 tables inside, 12 seats at the sushi bar. It was almost full at 1 p.m.. The menu covers are made of bamboo, and so are the paper wrapped chopsticks. When they bring you the menu, they also give you the sushi and roll menu and a pen, so you can order that way if you wish. We decided to not go with the specials and ordered some crazy things, oddly, no rice was involved in any of our dishes. {Actually there was a reason for my eating no carbs, and you’ll find that out in a future post}
We read the sushi and roll menu and decided on the very last one listed- "Monkey Brains"-
($6.95)
Hush.
Deep fried spicy tuna with mushroom. Well, the idea of a deep fried mushroom sounded like County Fair Food and we both enjoy that as one of our treats when we do go to the Fair, as well as we wanted to try some spicy tuna…so we chose it. There were those four half tennis ball sized pieces as the serving- and then the cross section- spicy tuna, a layer of real crab and then a flavorful portobella mushroom cap on the bottom, deep fried. The description did not say it had crab, but I did notice that ‘crab’ was spelled correctly all over the menu, so I was happy. The melding of the flavors was perfect. The tuna was a nice spicy hot, the crab and mushroom both flavorful, the crunchies, fish eggs and green onions left over helped with our other plates and the sauce on the plate had a nice blend of sweet and heat. The fried crust was nice, light,not oily. Sure, nothing traditional, but we have established that I am the Caucasian person from East County blogging here…It tasted good and was fresh.
We decided to try the sesame chicken appetizer ($5.95) as opposed to the sesame chicken lunch special, which would have been $1 more and had less chicken, but would have had rice, a piece of tempura’d onion, salad, and 4 pieces of California roll. This was all chicken in a not too sweet teriyaki sauce and sesame seeds, served with daikon (and a piece of broccoli) This was a good 3/4 pound, easily, of dark meat chicken and was cooked well- the meat was juicy and flavorful. I did end up dipping it in the hot sauce from the ‘Monkey Brains’, just to get rid of some of the sweetness after eating a good portion of it. 
We decided to try the Seared Albacore Salad ($7.95). This was a good choice. The albacore was cut in chunks and not thinly sliced, as it would be for sashimi, but it was only lightly seared, still raw in the center of each cube and served on a bed of mixed greens with a nice spicy dressing, daikon, radish sprouts and, as you can see, surrounded by a border of thinly sliced tomato. It was just a beautiful, as well as flavorful, presentation. There was a lot of albacore on this salad, as well as the token piece of burdock, which seems to be included on every salad in every Japanese restaurant we go to.
There were many Caucasian people eating lunch here. All the workers were Japanese. I heard the owner is Korean. Everyone was helpful and friendly and willing to answer questions. It is a small place. MY ONLY COMPLAINT WAS THE MUSIC WAS TURNED UP FULL VOLUME THE WHOLE TIME WE WERE THERE. Five television sets, two set to basketball and three set to Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera ‘live’ concerts.
Tokyo Sushi Loha Japanese Bistro 6784 El Cajon Boulevard, Suite D San Diego 92115 (619)644-8600 fax (619) 697-1937
Lunch Mon-Sat 11:30-3:00 Dinner Mon-Sat 5:00-9:30 (10:00 on Fri-Sat) Dinner only Sunday 4:00 p.m.-9:30 p.m.