Sushi can sometimes feel a bit binary — $23 for an all-you-can-eat lunch at Sushi Taku or $440-plus per person for a luxurious omakase at Kyōten? Maybe you’re more a la carte; you enjoy jumbo fried maki rolls delivered from your local family-owned spot. Or you pick up some affordable minimalist sashimi at Lawrence Fish Market.
At 312 Fish Market, sushi lovers can get it all, priced high to low, in an unexpected place. You’ll find it in the food court next to the second-floor grocery store of East Pilsen 88 Marketplace.
“We’re trying to serve great food at a great price,” owner Jackson Chiu said.
His co-partner, chef Joe Fung, formerly of Sushi-San, leads a menu that punches far above its weight, taking takeout sushi to elegant heights and offering beautiful plates amongst the bustling shoppers looking for frozen dumplings and Asian fruit.
“I was not expecting such high-quality freshness in such a comically casual location,” Jake Potashnick, a Chicago native behind the upcoming restaurant Feld, said over email. Potashnick is one of several in the fine-dining restaurant industry who vouches for the full experience of food court sushi; count Thomas Keller, the most Michelin-starred chef in America, as another fan. Keller ate there with his crew last May, as documented on 312’s Instagram. Fung called that experience “unreal.”
You won’t easily find 312 Fish Market on your own; you may stumble across it while on a trip to 88 Marketplace or through a recommendation. Potashnick frequented the grocery store, but says he “always rolled my eyes at the random sushi spot in the middle. Boy, was I wrong.”
When he posted about 312 on his TikTok account @notyetachef, Potashnick said “all of the comments were people pissed off that I was blowing up their spot.”
But Potashnick says, “this is the exact kind of spot that should blow up. They have attention to detail, high-quality produce, great hospitality, and it’s laid back and affordable.”
312 Fish Market is only one of several stalls in 88 Marketplace’s food court, nestled next to stands selling Hong Kong-style BBQ, dumplings and Chinese bakery items. While their food court peers favor white plastic tables, the team at 312 renovated heavily, with sleek dark wood tables and a transparent display case where you can see what’s on offer. They do offer waitstaff and a sushi bar for those who choose to dine in.
“I don’t think being in a Chinese supermarket matters,” Chiu said. “I think this area in general, was in dire need of an actual restaurant that served great quality fish.”
Despite ambitious plating and fresh ingredients, 312 Fish retains elements of its food court roots; the menu is relatively spare, without much hot food like miso soup. If you choose to dine-in, you serve yourself water out of a pitcher and it’s BYOB.
The restaurant opened in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, with a focus on takeout and paltry seating. Chiu and Fung hadn’t worked together before; they knew each other from their time attending John C. Haines Elementary School. Chiu grew up in a restaurant industry family and Fung worked his way up from a busboy to Sushi-San.
Chiu, who has dragon tattoos on each arm to symbolize his birth year, says he wasn’t actually looking to start a new restaurant; he had exited his first restaurant Runa in Wicker Park in 2017 (Runa has since closed.). But an offer came from 88 Marketplace’s owner, the details of which he declined to discuss, that allowed him to reduce his costs and pass that on to the consumer. He called on Fung, who then brought over several of his fellow Sushi-San colleagues, and their partnership was born.
“Since we started in the pandemic, we were trying to focus on how people would order takeout to go and eat it at home,” Fung said. But as more customers came to dine in the food court, they expanded their seating and Fung’s team introduced more fatty nigiri cuts meant to be eaten immediately. Soon, word of a food court sushi restaurant serving high-quality fresh fish made them very very busy.
“We wanted to be that local sushi bar,” Fung said. “We technically need a bigger spot, but we keep expanding.”
They say they go through 200 pounds of salmon in about two days. They have ambitions to consistently offer omakase (listed online at $160 for 17 courses), but so far it’s been limited.
But they built their following with the “Party Time” menu section, a selection of mega platters featuring a variety of rolls. There you’ll find my usual order, the Master Maki: a smattering of standard entry-level fare: 48 rolls of California, Spicy Yellowtail, Spicy Salmon, Dragon, Rainbow and Caterpillar for $55. The menu points out this is a little over a dollar per piece.
“A lot of the platters are a little for everyone,” Fung said. “(With both raw and cooked), it’s a good balance. It feeds the family.”
I’m always looking for reliable sushi that won’t break the bank. My marriage came out of an absurd college deal: $2.75 for an order of sweet potato tempura rolls at the now-shuttered Ann Arbor campus dig, Sushi.com. At our most unhinged, we’d order nearly two dozen of this festival of carbs for under $10 dollars; they weren’t very good, but they were filling.
Over a decade after that, 312 Fish Market is now our affordable sushi dinner spot. They do offer my reliable sweet potato rolls ($5 an order). They fry them in a light tempura batter in a communal kitchen shared with the rest of the food court. And it’s not even a sweet potato, technically: “We only use a Japanese yam, which is a lot better and we actually sourced it directly from the market,” Chiu continues. “It is a lot sweeter than your regular sweet potato, which is typically orange. Ours is very white and it’s creamy.”
Chiu and Fung credit the quality of their fish and produce to their unnamed supplier, which focuses on Japanese imports. The market gets shipments on a near-daily basis, whole fish that they butcher and break down in-house. The duo are in constant communication with with their supplier to get deals on quality fish, jumping on other restaurants’ canceled orders and offering them as specials. This nimbleness is refreshing for Fung, who previously worked at the Lettuce Entertain You group.
“Even some of the nicer restaurants in the area, they aren’t able to source a large 525-pound tuna,” Chiu said. The store posts videos of massive fish breakdowns on their Instagram.
“Our prices are a lot lower than most restaurants, but the thing is that we source a lot more than they do,” Chiu says. He admits they’re due for an increase. But he also takes pride in maintaining their prices and their quality.
“You can get in and out of there for a steal,” said customer Rebecca Friedlander. “And I think that there are similar places that maybe present big platters like that who are maybe, let’s say more affordable but don’t have quite the finesse and the elegance and that the caliber of fish that 312 offers.”
Friedlander says she was introduced to 312 Fish Market through her friends, chefs Genie Kwon and Tim Flores of the James Beard Award-winning Kasama. “To flip that around, if you’re feeling spendy, they’ll go through all the cuts of tuna with you,” Friedlander continues. “(They) just deliver this enormous parade of beautiful cuts of fish.”
Potashnick declared in a video the Hamachi Belly ($7 a piece) nigiri No. 1 in a list of top bites of 2023. Friedlander’s favorite is the Muki Hotate nigiri ($6.50 a piece), scallop with lime zest and charcoal salt. Wanting to expand past my usual Party Time tendencies, I tried those two alongside a variety of other nigiri. Never one for shrimp in any sushi context, I was stunned by the complexity of the ebi botan nigiri, Canadian spot prawn served alongside its fried head.
In terms of price, my nine pieces came out to a similar bill to the 48-maki roll platter. This is the duality of 312: high-end nigiri next to platters to feed a crowd. In the middle, there’s also the popular negi hamachi handrolls ($6 for a generously sized order), scallions and yellowtail wrapped in a perfect nori and rice package. Filling and fresh.
When asked about their success and whether they feel they’ve outgrown their stall, Chiu says “312 is always going to be here; no matter how big we get… we’re always going to keep it 312 forever. The people that treated us well, we’re still going to be here.”
Despite that, both Fung and Chiu said a second location with expanded kitchen capabilities, including hot food and izakaya options, is fairly far along in the planning, though nothing is official yet.
“We can be in the middle of a basement, it could be in a railroad station,” Chiu said. “As long as we’re efficient, good and clean. It doesn’t make a difference for us.”
312 Fish Market is open every day except Wednesday, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., 2105 S. Jefferson St. (located in the second-floor food court of 88 Marketplace, accessible by escalator and elevator.), 872 222-7288, 312fishmarket.com
