Ozenya

Authentique
Epicerie, cours de cuisine, plats sur place ou à emporter, salon de thé.

What a fantastic find!
I was starting to think that Grenoble was awful for sushi options after a trip to ayako at Caserme de Bonne, where food was expensive and of poor quality.
Ozenya is a non-​assuming little place which could easily be overlooked when working around the centre. Not noticing this little Japanese deli/​café would be very sad though…
You first enter a little shop which sells everything from matcha chocolate and pocky to ramen noodles and take away bento boxes. You go through into a little cute room and find yourself in a cosy little room with Japanese books and tables with flowery table cloths.
The waitress was bright, bubbly and incredibly beautiful. I spoke to her after, and it turns out that she speaks Italian, French, English and Japanese (mother tongue), so is also a real polyglot.
She handed me and my Japanese friend some menus, telling us that the 8 euro plat du jour was a noodle dish. There were limited choices, which personally I think is usually a good thing as it means that products are made lovingly and with fresh ingredients. There were two onigari options, one with salmon and the other with konbu. There were a few varieties of sushi, including inari (sweet deep fried tofu) pouches which are vegetarian. Then there were some side dishes like miso soup, steamed rice and wakame salad. There were also plenty of teas on offer.
Being two students on a budget, we both went for the inari sushi (3.50 euros) and the wakame salad (3.50 euros), and asked for some tap water. We got two quite big inari on each little plate and a good amount of salad. The salad was very tasty and seasoned well with sesame seeds and oil. The inari was excellent, very fresh and the rice was very fresh and tasty. The presentation was perfect and everything on my plate looked very good. Everything also tasted good.
If I had had more money I would have happily gone for one of the specialty Japanese sweets, they looked divine.
I will be back for tea, cakes, and that Japanese veggie curry dish of the day which the waitress mentioned they sometimes make!