On display at the recently opened Sushi Sei Sushi Bar in District VII are enormous, glistening pieces of yellowtail, being cut and rolled expertly into huge hand-rolls. There are also fat udon noodles in a savory made-to-order soup. In the kitchen, simofuri beef sizzles on a grill, then is drown in sukiyai sauce. Everything looks fantastic.

Unfortunately, the display is a flat-screen television on the wall, playing a travel-log about Japanese cuisine that is on constant loop. What you - the real-life customer can expect - is much less entertaining.

If I have a prejudice in reviewing, it is that I play favorites to hole-in-the-wall ethnic eateries. I prefer authenticity and personal care over marketing and sleek design. Sushi Sei would seem to fit the bill: it is almost literally a hole in the wall at the back of a manicured but empty lot off Kazinczy utca. The space is small, modern, clean: exactly what a sushi bar should look like. Its mere existence in this quiet bit of District VII should be cause for celebration.

I, however, will do my celebrating from afar, perhaps at the whimsical Café BoBek across the street, cleansing the taste Sushi Sei left in my mouth with a shot of something strong. Sushi Sei is bad in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the lunch menu. They advertise a budget lunch Sushi Menu for Ft 990 (€3.70), which includes miso soup and a small bento box. This is misleading at best, for there is not one small-size bento box on offer that contains even a single piece of sushi. Not even a lowly California roll. What you get is a choice of fairly haggard looking pieces of grilled fish, chicken or beef dishes, that are accompanied by mixed vegetable and shrimp tempura. Making anything-but-fresh tempura taste good is a losing battle to begin with, but micro-waving it, as they did at Sushi Sei, turned both veggies and batter limp and lifeless. The beef of the Yakiniku in the Yakiniku Bento Box (pictured) tasted like some Hungarian-Japanese hybrid, with its red pepper and onion base. I imagine that if Malév had a Japanese theme flight, this is what they might serve. The dish is a disaster.

I did order sushi separately. As they bill themselves as a sushi bar, one would expect more selection than just salmon and tuna, but that is all the nigiri available a la carte. I ordered a piece of each, at Ft 400 per. It was fine. It had better have been: anything less than fine sushi could put you in the hospital. What irked me about their nigiri was not just the lack of variety, it was that they sell both wasabi and pickled ginger separately, at Ft 150 each. Sensing my simmering outrage, the counter help (who I cannot flaw, none of this was her fault) offered me some wasabi on the house. When all was said and done, the alleged sushi lunch special was around Ft 2,500.

As the spawn of the larger, more legitimate Sushi Sei restaurant in Buda, my guess - and this is unconfirmed - is that the food at Sushi Sei Sushi Bar is prepared off-site, which doesn’t make it much of a sushi bar, but rather a sushi outlet not much different from the cooler in an upscale Spar. But, with several locations, including two in Pest and one in Buda, it seems to be winning over local diners who crave something different, fast, and healthy. All that is a great mission to have as a purveyor of Japanese food: but why not make it a touch more authentic and generous, in flavor and spirit? They need only watch the screen in their own restaurant to see how it is done.