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When you live in the southwest corner of Baltimore City, your options for sushi are rather limited. You could drive into, say, Federal Hill and hit Matsuri, or you could head over to the Baltimore National Pike and get something at the H-Mart, but neither is exactly convenient. Which led us, recently, to try the sushi at a little Chinese take-out place in downtown Arbutus, just outside the city line. Both the interior and the exterior of Grace Cafe are rather grim and dingy, and the sushi chef's prep area--if you can really call it that--featured a small cooler of plastic-wrapped slabs of fish displayed in no particular (or attractive) order. Despite a mild sense of foreboding about ordering sushi from a place that doesn't look like sushi is its best dish, we ordered. But we played it safe: two California rolls ($3.60 each), one shrimp tempura roll ($4.25), one spicy tuna roll ($3.85), and an order of steamed dumplings ($4.25). The shrimp tempura was kind of chewy and overcooked, the tempura soggy. The tuna in the spicy tuna roll was passable, though it didn't taste as fresh as we would have liked. It's tough to mess up a California roll, and that was probably what we liked best out of this batch of sushi. As for the dumplings--well, in my mind, there's almost no such thing as a bad dumpling. The highlight of the meal.

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