I've become totally addicted to sushi. Shortly after moving to San Francisco, I explored my neighborhood to find all the good sushi spots. It turns out there's no shortage of sushi restaurants in the Castro.
Within a week, I'd found my place (All Season Sushi, if you're interested). By this time, I'd already discovered my love for unagi. But there's only so much unagi you can eat until you need something else (for me, that level is only reached after eating six unagi nigiri, but as I said, I love the stuff.
There are plenty of sushi rolls that combine unagi with some other tastes to come up with something that's delectable. My favorite is the caterpillar roll. A caterpillar roll is a roll stuffed with crab meat and cucumber on the inside, and with avocado and unagi on the outside. Most of the time, I've also had it with tobiko sprinkled on the outside as well.
So why is it called a caterpillar roll? Well, the first time I had it, the roll was laid out as though it was a caterpillar crawling through a bed of lettuce. Additionally, the "head" of the caterpillar had an extra bunch of tobiko, and a little pair of sprouts sticking up that looked like antenna.
Naturally, I assumed that all sushi places that served caterpillar rolls made them like this. Unfortunately, other sushi places don't seem to know that the one true way to make a caterpillar roll is to actually make it as though it's a caterpillar.