Ginmiya used to be my favorite place in York for both Americanized Chinese grub and sushi. I would say that remains true with the Chinese fare. But I've been horribly disappointed in the sushi during my last few visits.
I went here twice when I visited home over the holidays, once with my mom and a friend for Chinese food and once with my special dude for a sushi date. As usual, the Chinese food was great: hot, fresh, with perfectly crisp veggies. The brown sauce they use in their dishes also deserves its own special accolade: in addition to being fantastically delicious, it doesn't make me want to take a five year nap after I scarf my food down.
The sushi date, however, was a major disappointment. We ordered the Crazy Mushroom roll and the Hidden Dragon rolls to share, because I'd had both years ago and remembered them being amazing. Additionally, we both ordered a lunch special, which came with 2 or 3 rolls and a side of miso soup. I ordered an avocado roll and sweet potato tempura roll; the dude ordered a cucumber roll, spicy tuna roll, and a roll with conch that I forget the actual name of. The miso soup the specials came with was tasty, but it was largely a bowl of broth with only trace amounts of seaweed and a few tiny diced up bits of tofu. The rolls were the real disappointment, though: sloppily assembled and cut, uneven, with bits of filling poking out. The two special rolls also didn't seem to have heterogeneous fillings: somehow things seemed to have gotten mixed together/muddied in the process of creating the rolls? It was very strange. To top it off, I noticed a few minutes later that my Hidden Dragon roll wasn't a Hidden Dragon roll: it was supposed to have eel, mango, avocado, etc., and what I got had none of these things. I ate it anyway, because whatever they'd given had ingredients we both liked and for all I knew I had accidentally ticked the wrong box when I was ordering. The more simple rolls were better, but still sloppy. Taste-wise, I'd say everything was just ok, if not bland and blah. To put it another way, nothing stood out as being unusually good, but it wasn't completely abysmal, either. I recalled to my dude that I'd been to Ginmiya earlier in the year and made the same observation, thinking that visit had been on an off day. Evidently not.
Service has been more consistent over the years than the food, apparently; I've always found the staff to be friendly and attentive. No complaints there. Although when our waitress boxed out leftover sushi, she just kind of randomly piled it in one of those white foam boxes, in layers. I've never seen sushi layered before, and sure enough, when we dug into it later that evening, the rolls had all stuck together and fell apart when we tried to separate them.
Next time I'm in York with a Chinese craving, I will definitely still swing by Ginmiya. But I'll be looking elsewhere for sushi. read more