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| - Let me start off by saying I love this place. It's my favorite sushi restaurant in Toronto, and if it wasn't inconsistent at times it'd be an easy five stars. ND Sushi & Grill does high-end sushi the way I want it - fresh fish, expertly sliced and prepared, with bold flavors where bold flavors should be and subtlety where appropriate. There are few bombastic, sensationalized offerings here: it's largely about the fish, and the selection is usually very seasonable and leaning towards what's good on any given week. That being the case the menu rotates often, and can even be a little sparse when the local availability of topnotch fish only allows for a limited range of offerings. Some things you want may not always be offered here, like uni and otoro.
If you're familiar with places like Japango and Wow Sushi, the actual size of the nigiri here may be surprising; they're far larger, with big slabs of fish draped languidly over each portion of rice. Every piece of nigiri's a mouthful, ensuring that the fish makes contact with every part of your tongue and that you fully appreciate the textures on display.
The value here's very good, especially for lunch. They do a sushi lunch special for twelve bucks that keeps me coming back, which includes a miso soup that's on the high end of average; a surprisingly delightful salad; a California Roll that bespeaks far more care than the usual throwaway filler sushi lunchers have come to expect; and five pieces of nigiri. The nigiri changes all the time, but the set pictured below included delicate hirame that tasted lightly of the sea; buttery red snapper with a bit of a firmer texture and a deeper flavor of ocean brine; perfectly fresh maguro that just dissipated in my mouth with an almost tart aspect to the finish; buttery and mild sockeye salmon, caught in the wild and plucked straight off that day's special board; and a conventional farmed salmon that offered pleasant contrast. Other days the lunch has included stuff like hamachi, kampachi, and albacore, the latter being the only underwhelming offering (I've never been excited by albacore sushi and find it to be nearly flavourless).
The Dynamite Roll is a high-end take on the kind-of-trashy-but-still-delicious classic, and it's huge; it's prepared as a futomaki and packed with crab to augment the tempura'd prawn, hence the size. Really good. On the other end of the scale, the Blue Ocean Roll is subtle and wonderful, letting the sweetness of hokkaido scallop play against the rich background of avocado, and framing the flavours with the salty crunch of a little tobiko. It's simple, but it's outstanding and it's a must-order in my mind.
I've never had to wait for a seat here, for lunch or dinner hours. I don't know how that's possible; do people just ignore Baldwin Village? That's a shame, because there's some great food in the area, and I find it touch to believe since Kinton Ramen is /right/ there and gets a ton of press. I dunno. But regardless, this place is super-convenient and I've never needed to place a reservation.
I've only had one bad experience at ND Sushi, which sadly struck when I took a group here to grab lunch during TIFF. It was pretty abysmal; we got a couple rolls a la carte, which were great as usual, but the sushi lunch was... not the paradise I just described above. The california, usually a cut above other sushi lunches, was oddly unbalanced and ham-handedly assembled. The fish was flavorless, and regular ol' sake appeared twice out of the five pieces of nigiri. I've never had that happen before, and it was frankly embarrassing to tell my party about this awesome sushi place I'd been going to twice a week for a couple months, and then show up and be so totally let down.
Of course, it hasn't happened since. Maybe they were really busy during TIFF, but still, it was disappointing to have to knock what would've been a five-star review down to a four. Still, probably my favorite sushi place in Toronto, minus Hiro and Jabistro which are still on my to-do list.
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