It's been almost two years since last time I dined out at a sushi restaurant, or at any place. I miss that part of routine and sushi omi provided me a wonderful warmup experience before life got back to normal.
This is a quiet 15-seater restaurant. Three young chefs each serve 5 guests for the sushi omakase menu and any optional add-ons. The quality and portion of food are both solid here, with minor things such as knife and flavoring skills to be fine-tuned. Overall, it's a promising restaurant that I would like to revisit.
The omakase menu at $138 was designed quite well, opening up with two appetizers, then followed by sashimi plate, 10 pieces of sushi, handroll, tamago, soup and dessert. I was super full after all the dishes. The fish was mostly fresh, the rice to fish ratio was also perfect. Unfortunately, the Wasabi definitely overpoweres the fish for many sushi dishes.
We also ordered a couple of a la cart items. I didn't like niether of the foil Gras sushi (too greasy, not flavourful) and the fish liver (tasted too plain) though. Ju izakaya offered much better fish liver.
Omakase items:
- Cod with fried onion: The cod was so fresh and soft and light flavored. It melted in my mouth immediately. The onion was cut so finely that I couldn't even taste a strong flavor of it. One of my favorite dish here. Portion was quite generous too.
- Octopus with radish: When I first saw it, I thought it would be a refreshing dish with slightly sour flavoring. However, it was surprising to see that the octopus turned out to be dipped in Cantonese soup base with orange peel (maybe the chef adjusted to local customers' taste?). I still liked it. The octopus was soft and radish was sweet.
- Sashimi plate: The server introduced the order of eating the four types of fishes. Well-designed order by the chefs, from light-flavoured madai, botan ebi to stronger-flavoured sea bass and chu-toro. I really liked the ebi and the Madai. Chu-toro was really soft, but a bit not fresh. Sea bass tasted like nothing. The server didn't seem to know the fishes very well, with confusing introductions on fish types.
- Golden eye sushi: I liked it. The fish was really fresh and tasty, although wasabi was a bit strong.
- Shima aji: I had high expectation on this since Rain sushi impressed me on this dish. However, it just turned okish.
- Blue fin tuna: One of my favorite dish again. Fortunately for this dish, the flavor of the tuna was not overpowered by Wasabi.
- Chu-toro: The fish was fatty and melty enough.
- O-toro: I didn't like it being torched. It lost the fun of swallowing a big piece of fat meat. The Wasabi directly killed my nose. Too much of it!
- Scallop: It was very fresh and sweet. Again, the Wasabi strongly overpowered the flavour of the fish. Too bad.
- Aji/uni: Again, good fish being overpowered by Wasabi. Nose killing!
- Sea bream: I liked this dish! It was torched and the glummy texture tasted very interesting.
- Saba: not impressed
- Handroll: Fish was super yummy, but seaweed was too soft and old. It even got stucked in my mouth.
- Tofu pudding: I generally disliked tofu dessert, but this one was good. I liked that the texture was being made so smooth.
- Surprise birthday cake: Coffee flavour cake. Really tasty. I think the dessert quality at this place was comparable to a good bakery.
Overall, by witnessing the whole process of how young chef prepared dishes, we can see they are lack of experience sometimes. However, the food quality was still quite good with great materials. To reduce the quantity of Wasabi being used is my biggest advice. I would revisit hoping they fine tune some minor problem. read more