Sushi Tozaki

Most of the counters we map in Tottori earn their place through proximity — the boat at the pier, the fish that never saw a distribution center. Sushi Tozaki (鮨 とざき) earns its place through a rarer thing in this prefecture: trained Edomae technique, carried home. The chef apprenticed at a sushi shop in Tokyo, and — by the account of Yonago City's own profile of the family — even returned to the capital alone for a further stretch of training before opening here. What he brought back to the Sea of Japan coast is the discipline of the city counter, set down in a town that had never quite had one at this level.

The room is the second half of the story. Tozaki works inside the Zengoro-gura (善五郎蔵), a white-walled storehouse from 1891 that is now a registered tangible cultural property, a nine-minute walk from Yonago Station. It is course-only and reservation-based, the chef setting the day's run while his wife keeps the front of the house — a genuinely family operation in the sense the framework prizes. The fish leans on nearby Sakai-Minato (境港), one of the great landing ports of the Japan Sea, but he also pulls from Tokyo's Toyosu (豊洲) market when the counter calls for it. That is the honest compromise of the place: this is not a pure chi-no-ri shop trading only on what landed that morning a few kilometers north. It is a chef choosing the best material for the rice, wherever it sleeps.

On the plate that means real, worked nigiri rather than the fast freshness of a port counter — fish handled with the curing and seasoning instincts of the Edomae school, over carefully dressed shari. For roughly ¥10,000 to ¥15,000 it is the most ambitious sushi in western Tottori, and at a Tabelog standing of 3.53 across 42 reviews it is also the prefecture's most consistently praised counter outside the capital of Tottori City itself. Diners single out the refinement of the fish and the warmth of the husband-and-wife welcome in equal measure.

Two practical notes before you go. The shop is small and works course-only, so the reservation is not optional — call or book through AutoReserve well ahead, especially in crab season. And because the room is a converted warehouse with table rooms beyond the counter, ask for a counter seat explicitly if the close-up work is what you came for. Confirm the exact course price, the service-charge handling, and the photography policy at booking; a restored storehouse run by two people keeps its own quiet rules, and asking is the courteous first move.