Being spontaneous makes life interesting, but you have to take the good with the bad.

On the downside, I’d tried to pop into Morio’s Sushi Bistro twice to no avail because the tiny 18-seat sushi bar is always packed, a favorite among those in the know. Reservations generally involve a wait of a week or two, two to three months for larger parties, but being spontaneous means I rarely bother with reservations.

On the positive side, I recently bumped into a mall owner who happened to be the beneficiary of a reservation at Morio’s when his daughter found she couldn’t make it there after all, four months after reservations were secured. The reservation was for six that night, and they needed one more person. Would I like to join them? Being spontaneous, the answer was "Yes!"

It was so nice to walk in and find a seat waiting for a change. If I were to commit to another visit, I’d try to wrangle a seat at the sushi bar, where four can watch Morio Arime at work.

If getting a seat is difficult, Arime aims to make the experience worthwhile, going overboard on omakase and sushi selections. As soon as you’re seated, he proffers a complimentary appetizer of soybeans, tossed green salad and the requisite tamago, savory rolled egg presented here with bits of carrot and green onion scattered between the layers.

Then it’s time to get down to the business of seafood. There’s no better way to start than with Morio’s Chef’s Special omakase ($48), which results in love at first bite when devouring buttery rich hamachi, hamachi belly, fatty ahi, salmon, sweet abalone and crunchy clam so thinly sliced it had the texture of firm kelp. (Omakase is also available for $35 without abalone.)

If you do get the abalone version, the mollusk’s guts are served later, dished with ponzu sauce. (The downside of being someone else’s guest is you have to be game for anything, so I was goaded to eat the innards, but they are not much different from downing a raw oyster.)

Before you balk at the price, consider that our server said the Chef’s Omakase would feed six. That was hard to believe, so we kept trying to confirm it. Sure enough, there was one piece of each fish for every person, so all of us got a good sampling. However, who can settle for just one piece of hamachi? We loved the omakase so much that pretty soon a second round was on its way, to which Arime — sensing big appetites — added tako and snapper.

A couple could dine here quite reasonably, picking one omakase and perhaps one hot dish or sushi roll, such as the red dragon roll ($13.50), a dragon ($11.25), or what most people would call a California roll, with unagi layered on top.

Having had our fill of sashimi, it was time for some hot food, and while it almost seemed like sacrilege to veer from the raw menu, Arime is no sushi snob. "You gotta work with people," he says, adding that he’s happy when customers order hot food. "The profit margin is higher," he said.

One of the musts is the seafood dynamite ($12.95), which seems to contain a bit of everything, from white fish to salmon, shrimp and tako, in generous chunks. Whereas this dish elsewhere seems to comprise yesterday’s leftovers, here the flavors are fresh, the texture dense and meaty.

Also generous is the mixed tempura, which comes with the requisite three pieces, with zucchini, melt-in-your-mouth seaweed and crunchy rings that looked like onions but turned out to be calamari.

We moved on to the 16-piece nigiri ($35). (Twelve pieces are $27.50.) The 16-piece platter was laden with one each of salmon, hamachi, hamachi belly, maguro, chutoro, amaebi, snapper, mackerel, regular shrimp, tako, unagi, ikura, uni, ika, clam, scallop and one other fish.

It’s weird to leave such treasures on the table, but by this time we were so full, half of it had to be packed to go.

I also requested an order of unagi nigiri ($7.25) to go, assuming the usual two pieces of sushi with a little ginger on the side. I was pleasantly surprised when I got home and peeked into the box to find three pieces of sushi packed beautifully with four pieces of egg and an order of soybeans. Arime had gone above and beyond expectation.

By the way, it’s B.Y.O.B. here. Bring some for Arime and you may be rewarded.

Reserve now and you could be seated by April.

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Nadine Kam’s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously. Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com.