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| - A friend suggested we meet here for dinner. I agreed, then looked it up and was horrified by the reviews, and fearful of food poisoning. I told my friend that I would like to go conditionally--we could pop our heads in and if it looked okay, we could stay.
It looked okay, when checked out the place--maybe a little unpleasant, in that some of the tables were uncleared and so on, but this might just have been busyness. It was pretty full, with only a couple of seats going to spare. The woman who seated us seemed curt and sullen, however, there was a man who served our table for the most part (the woman refilled our tea once). The man was friendly, smiling and helpful.
We went for AYCE. And it was fine. I didn't get food poisoning, which always raises my rating of a restaurant where raw fish is served by one star.*
So it was fine. And the rolls were... fine. The ones made for us last night didn't look like they were made by a "blindfolded 8 year old cutting with a hacksaw" (as another reviewer eloquently put it--perhaps a different sushi chef, or else she encountered she same sushi chef as we did, but at the beginning of his career, and how he's in that mid-career slump). On the other hand, perhaps that would have made them more interesting, at least visually? They were pretty standard AYCE, generally. Taste-wise, they were fine, but not fabulous. Each piece of my dynamite roll was too big to manage in one bite, and we all know that this makes for some messiness, as you have to do it in two bites, the flavours don't blend the same way, and unless you're that special combination of skilled and lucky, it falls apart while your'e chewing your first bite. But it was fine. Nothing to write home about (home being Vancouver, where sushi is generally yum and less uneven than the stuff out here, it seems).
One special note is the spicy salmon roll. Last summer at a sushi place on the Danforth whose name I do not recall, a friend warned us away from the spicy rolls. He said that they use crappy cuts of fish and disguise it with the spicy sauce. I had never heard of such a thing--we often have sushi out in Waterloo (as we live there part time), and it has always been fine--the same cut of fish as the regular roll, with some spicy sauce drizzled over.
Last night, I saw what my friend meant. The spicy salmon roll featured finely chopped salmon, mixed with the spicy sauce--and closer examination confirmed that yes, the lighter stuff in the chopped meat side was not merely sauce, but also fatty, less appealing bits. I tried a bite and this reinforced my friend's warning, which I now pass on to you, with the note that at least for now, in Waterloo, this is not the case. There, the spicy rolls are not crappy cuts of meat disguised by spice. But sadly, at least some AYCE places here, no doubt faced with higher overhead and fierce competition, seem to have decided to take short cuts where they can least afford to--on the food itself, while hoping that the flat rate AYCE pricing will make up for it. The fact that I won't rush back to this place indicates that at least for me, the pricing doesn't make up for it--I'd rather have a tasty bento box, well-prepared, than such mediocre AYCE.
*I think my rating would more accurately (from the descriptions) be "meh--I've had better" because this is precisely true. But, most people seem to be writing really horrid reviews alongside their two star ratings, so I assume that 2 stars is actually more negative than that and three stars is more of a "meh" in practice. I'm going with that.
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