Sushi Mania


“The lovely looking assorted plate makes you want to go to a kitchenware shop to update your arsenal, at least half of which is comprised of items purchased when your age started with a two…” Adva Gan Stav at Sushi Mania in Raanana.

For 34 years I’ve been Advah, with an h. This year, I got rid of it, dropped the h. Just like that. All of a sudden. The h suddenly didn’t seem like mine any more, heavy and cumbersome. Psychologists would probably jump on this like a cheetah on fresh meat.

At Sushi Mania their isn’t much thought behind names. They understand that all the maki and nigiri (and those are the familiar ones, I’m not even trying the ones that have more than six letters) sound just the same and make most of us feel utterly bewildered, leading us to play it safe by ordering some sort of combination. At Sushi Mania the menu is colourful and attractive, and speaks to me in a language I understand: pictures. We browsed the images and chose whatever looked tasty. ‘This one and…that one and this one’, I stammered refreshingly.

The first ‘this one’ was Sushi Mania’s miso soup. Tasty, pretty and served in a clay bowl covered with a lid that keeps it warm. The second ‘that one’ was an amazing salmon sashimi salad, made up of slices of salmon on a bed of lettuce, baby greens, carrot, shitake mushrooms, cucumber, avocado, cherry tomatoes, green onion and wakame seaweed which we demolished every bite of. The third ‘this one’ was a lovely looking assorted plate, the sort that makes you want to go to a kitchenware shop to update your arsenal, at least half of which is comprised of items purchased when your age started with a two. The plate contains a crispy salmon and avocado sushi sandwich, salmon teriyaki inside-out maki covered in avodaco, spicy red tuna inside-out maki and salmon, avocado and green onion maki covered in deep fried panko. It was first rate. Tasty, fresh, soft when it’s meant to be and crisp when it’s supposed to be crisp. I don’t think I need to explain how terrible it is when this is reversed.

The Japanese beer that accompanied our every step at Sushi mania was with us also through the excellent crème brulee – and that’s not the alcohol speaking; Sushi Mania gets their desserts from the Italian restaurant next door. And don’t tell me that crème brulee isn’t Italian, you don’t always have to be right you know!

So now I am Adva, without the h. Lucky for me that google can find me with or without it, because if not all the3 million and five articles I’ve written, like this one about Sushi Mania, a restaurant that I’d actually like to remember, would be cast off into oblivion, along with my former h.

Sushi Mania
5 Ben Gurion St., Raanana
Tel: 09-7713505,09-7741080