It's Your Roll! (CLOSED)

NOTE: It's Your Roll has since closed. Spring Garden Diner operates in its former location.


Located at 1901 Spring Garden Street, It’s Your Roll! specializes in made-to-order sushi and rice bowls. Sides, sweets, and a beer selection are also available.

If the Chipotlefication of sushi causes you to raise a skeptical eyebrow, you are hardly alone. However, It’s Your Roll! demonstrates once again that choice, more often than not, is a good thing. The restaurant’s premise is great for newbies and seasoned sushiphiles alike: choose between a roll or a bowl ($6.50 for veggie-only rolls, $7.50 for protein rolls, and $7-$10 for protein bowls) and pick your rice, protein, up to three veggies, fillings, and a sauce. Those who know what they are doing can craft their own custom combinations right away. Meanwhile, those who are daunted can start with familiar ingredients and gradually branch out. The owners, Doug and Greg, will gladly explain your options and allow you to sample.

What raises this above the level of a mere gimmick, however, is the variety and selection of ingredients. Regular and spicy variants of tuna, salmon, and shrimp join Summerfield Farms beef and chicken to give you plenty of proteins to pick from. You can top these with everything from the conventional (cucumber and carrots) to the unexpected (mango and goat cheese), and there are plenty of sauces as well. Further, all of the ingredients are fresh: the proprietors claim to not even own a freezer.

For our first time up, my companion and I opted for spicy salmon, avocado, cucumber, daikon, cream cheese, and ponzu sauce. The ingredients tasted as fresh as they looked, the spicy and the cool and the sweet balanced nicely, and the generous portion of pickled ginger on the side added another dimension. Within one bite, we were already scheming for a return trip.

Housed in the former Bianca’s, It’s Your Roll! is a small building with an also- small and somewhat inconvenient parking lot. Inside, however, the establishment makes good use of the space. The décor is appropriately Asian-inspired with a green-and-orange twist added for color. There are also a few decidedly quirky touches: lightbulbs have been repurposed as flower holders, and for 50 cents, you can buy custom origami from a gumball machine. As befitting a restaurant that opened earlier in the month, everything looked shiny and new.

As it continues to grow, It’s Your Roll! will likely augment the menu (the owners alluded to some tempura offerings). Until that happens, don’t expect the same breadth as a Sushi Republic. Do expect fresh, flavorful, friendly, fast, and fun, all at a manageable price.

9/10

The Counselor

Impressed by the extravagance of his eccentric friends Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Malinka (Cameron Diaz), the unnamed counselor (Michael Fassbender), a successful criminal defense attorney, partners with cartel middleman Westray (Brad Pitt) to import drugs from Mexico. But when the deal goes bad, the counselor, his fiancée Laura (Penelope Cruz), and everyone around them find themselves in grave danger.

Perhaps more so than any film in recent memory, The Counselor is less than the sum of its parts. Written by one of America’s greatest living novelists (Cormac McCarthy), helmed by a tried-and-true director (Ridley Scott) and featuring an A-list cast, there is, on paper, no reason why this film shouldn’t work. And yet in practice, it simply doesn’t.

The blame rests almost entirely with its screenwriter. Part of what makes McCarthy’s novels – and No Country For Old Men, the most successful screen adaptation thereof – compelling is the juxtaposition of expansive landscape and minimalist dialogue. This allows for both a healthy dose of symbolism and for characters to define themselves through action. The Counselor, in contrast, is an overly talky film wherein characters eruditely wax philosophical mid-conversation for minutes on end. This robs the pacing of tension, the characters and their interactions of realism, and the audience of respect. Presumably, we would have recognized the film as a treatise on greed without being clobbered over the head with the idea.

Had someone – such as The Coen Brothers – been around to pare down the peachiness, what was left might well have delivered up to expectations. The film is well-shot, well-scored, and well-cast. The flashy wardrobes form a nice contrast with the stark desert landscapes, the unconventional soundtrack restores some of the lost tension, and the cast does its best with the material. Fassbender starts off as a slightly smug, coolly detached blank slate, but his emotional range grows as his circumstances worsen. Bardem arguably overacts, but in doing so, he injects a sense of fun while Pitt is appropriately cynical. The real surprises here are Diaz and Dean Norris. The former, usually a liability in dramatic fare, is chilling as the avaricious, panther-like Malinka, and the latter, as a drug buyer, does a hilarious 180 from his best-known role as a DEA agent on Breaking Bad.

Upon release, some criticized The Counselor for being both bloody and bleak. Those qualities are a given in McCarthy’s oeuvre. The greater sin here is that The Counselor confuses pedantry and pretension for enlightenment and entertainment.

7/10