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| - First let me qualify what my sushi standards are. I've eaten at about 50 restaurants in Japan, from subways to the best at Tsukiji. I wanted to try Nami because it is established, has quite a lot of good reviews, and I'm not yet familiar with many Toronto Japanese restaurants.
The short review. Don't go to Nami.
While on the surface it has many Japanese touches, these don't run very deep. The cheap wooden chopsticks and lack of oshibori should be a dead give away that this is not really a premium restaurant and all the little customs are missing from the service staff.
We ordered a very standard meal, tsukemono, seaweed salad, miso, nasu dengaku (which they were out of), as well as beef sashimi and the chef's sushi selection (15 pieces).
First, the tsukemono tasted like it was out of a can, like it was old. it had none of the usual light, fresh vinegary taste. It was rubbery and disgusting. The seaweed salad was okay, but the miso dressing tasted and looked like soy sauce mixed with oil. It was quite unflavourful and had a weird texture.
The miso soup was obviously missing the proper ratio of dashi and tasted thin and flavourless.
The beef sashimi was okay, although again, flavourless and somehow too dry for raw meat.
The sushi, (which is the really important part to me) was in part better than the appetizers, with the salmon, tuna, hamachi and other common fishes being okay - 7/10 for Canada standards. However the "difficult" fishes such as octopus and ika were nearly inedible. One fish, which I couldn't even identify, was so bad, as soon as I put it in my mouth I knew that it was off and I should have spit it out. For this kind of price I regret not making a fuss with the staff.
Long story short, this meal cost more than any sushi meal I've had in Toronto and could easily be surpassed by a good train station meal in Tokyo for 1/3rd the price. This is really a disappointing effort considering how they bill themselves. The chefs should be ashamed.
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