Sushi Sato is one of several restaurants chef Tim Ma has planned this year. Photograph courtesy Tim Ma Hospitality.Chef Tim Ma has added a cool factor to the DC area’s Chinese-American dining scene with his hit Lucky Danger. Now, he’s taking on all-you-can-eat sushi. He’ll open Sushi Sato in t he former Bronze space on H Street, Northeast near the end of April. “With my three kids, we eat a lot of sushi. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, but we’re just like, ‘Oh man, we love eating sushi, but we don’t own [a sushi restaurant], we should open one!,'” Ma says. He’d also seen the success of all-you-can-eat options around this city—from Balkan to Chinese— but sushi was one category missing in DC proper. Sushi Sato, named after a common Japanese surname, will offer standard $55 and premium $75 options with unlimited nigiri, rolls, and izakaya dishes. Both will have a two-hour time limit, and diners will be charged for food they don’t eat. “Basically, if you have more than one roll or something like that, you get charged a roll,” Ma explains. “It’s really just to prevent the abuse. And you know where we learned that? Red Lobster all-you-can-eat shrimp.” Ma says he’s been listening to a lot of podcasts about Red Lobster, whose endless shrimp promotion pushed the business to bankruptcy. Diners can also order a la carte with a combination of what you’d expect from your neighborhood sushi spot—plus some non-traditional fusion options. For example, Ma is toying with an In-N-Out Burger-inspired roll with shabu ribeye, shredded lettuce, caramelized onion, and thousand island dressing. A signature “Sato roll” combines soft-shell crab, eel, and scallop with a spicy sauce.  Meanwhile, izakaya dishes might include monkfish karaage, steak sandos, and “tako tacos” (spicy octopus in a crispy seaweed shell). The drink menu is still in development, but expect sake-based cocktails such as a sake-and-Japanese-gin martini or a riff on a lemon drop with mandarin orange. Sushi Sato will maintain some of the design elements of Bronze, the Afro-futurist restaurant that quietly closed last year. But Ma says they’ll be adding in a new sushi counter and accenting the space with “fun stuff,” like Japanese comic books as wallpaper. The third floor will be reserved for a future project that is not Sushi Sato. Meanwhile, Ma is shaping up to have a very busy spring. He’ll open a full-service location of Lucky Danger with a mahjong bar in Penn Quarter near the end of April. (The Chinese-American concept, which offers takeout from Arlington, also just opened a kiosk at Nationals Park.) Tacocat, an Asian fusion taco bar, is coming to Western Market food hall in Foggy Bottom. And Ma is also developing the Asian tapas menu for Kata, a nightlife destination opening shortly in Chinatown.The post An All-You-Can-Eat Sushi Restaurant Is Coming to H Street first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less