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| - There are many Japanese restaurant in Toronto.
There are some that can gave you the true experience of what Japanese food is like if you were to visit Japan.
There are some that mimic the Japanese style food and gets you the understanding of what Japanese food is like.
And there are some just slap the name "Japanese" on some food (like rice and raw fish) and call themselves "Japanese restaurant".
This place? Barely doing using the name Japanese on some food that doesn't remotely close to what Japanese food is like.
(Yes, this place is worst than some asian all you can eat place.)
Here is how...
When I walked in, the restaurant seems nice and the decor looks pretty good.
But disposable chopsticks? That doesn't look good. (Even food court at Eaton Centre serve with real knife and forks.)
Menu is pretty much lunch SPECIAL driven, which is understandable, and may be a good thing to someone who has a hard deciding what to eat.
I chose the unagi-don (BBQ-Eel on bowl of rice) and a chef's sashimi lunch. (Both came with a salad and bowl of miso soup)
The server came by later and asked me if I would like to have two bowl of salad and soup, or if just one set is fine. With the menu being lack of vegetables options, I choose to have two sets of salad and soup.
Salad and soup came, is nothing good to write about. See the picture I posted. Some of the lettuce had brown edges. The carrots was dried-out.
After a bit of waiting, both dishes came at the same time. Sashimi should came first as it needs no cooking time, but I guess since they use pre-cooked BBQ-eel, it was just a matter of reheating it? Then why it took soooo long?
As stated above, BBQ-eel was a pre-cooked one, and it came on top of a very small portion of rice. And the RICE, THE RICE...
Right now in Canada, you can buy rice directly from Japan at a premium price.
You can buy Japanese-style rice grown in USA and other places in the world.
And there are option that you can use as substitute for the Japanese-style short grain rice.
This place uses none of the above.
NONE OF THE ABOVE!!!
The long grain rice they use was cooked to a point that it's not sticky, and that's probably why they gave me a spoon for it. Also the bowl had a lot of sauces in it, making the entire bowl being overly sweet. I had to use the other bowl of plain rice that serves with the sashimi to balance out the sweetness.
So how should I rate this? Hmm...
On to the sashimi.
It came with 9 different cuts of different types of fish. While it looks good on plate, they did put the fish from a light to oily to sauced order, just having this-and-that all over the plate. It came with a bowl of warm rice in double the size of the unagi-don. Should came with a sushi rice that is slightly flavoured with the vinegar? Well, I don't know, but certainly not a bowl of simple long grain rice...
Price-wise, the sashimi is a bargain, 18 pieces of fish, a bowl of rice, a soup and a salad for just $28 in downtown Toronto? Come on. If I order just that, they at least would get one more star. Heck, if I ignore the rice, I would have gave it a 3 or 4 stars and continue to mislead people to try this place.
But the half-filled bowl of BBQ-eel over rice, came with a salad and soup, at the $20 price tag? I can buy a whole fresh eel and barbecue it and put it on top of a bowl of premium Japanese rice for less than that.
I just felt that the BBQ-eel rice bowl, has about $10+ of it goes toward the restaurant and not the food.
So it's a one star.
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