| rev:text
| - Recently, there is a hype around Kingyo Izakaya, the Vancouver-based Izakaya that has recently opened a store Toronto. We have heard a lot of good reviews about it and saw plenty pictures on facebook, even from our friend who tried in it Vancouver! JW and I couldn't bring ourselves to miss out on this!
Arriving around 7pm, Kingyo was not as crowded as Guu; the tables were placed fairly far from each other and there were not a lot of people. Yet, for the same reasons, the atmosphere certainly didn't feel as lively. We were being seated at a huge table with live Kingyo (aka Goldfish) swimming in a fish tank that is embedded into the table. Very interesting!
I want to start off by saying that the food at Kingyo comes really really fast. Shortly after we ordered, we had 4 dishes on our table ranging from Seafood don and shooters and sashimi. I recommend one to ask the servers to slow down like we did or else you will be way too overwhelmed and won't be able to truly savour the food.
We started off with Mr. Sada's Sea Urchin Shooters. I was very very very excited about the sea urchin shooters because of the extremely pleasant experience I had at Chicago's Arami. Yet, I was quite disappointed with Kingyo's sea urchin shooter.
My excitement sank when I saw the raw egg floating on top. But that wasn't not their fault, it was just me so I just spooned out the egg. Following our server's instructions and mixing everything very well, I took a sip of the shooter. The stickiness and taste of the yam was just not my thing. The next thing I realized, there was rice in the shooter and it was kind of weird! I know you are supposed eat the rice with the sea urchin and the combination is perfect when you are eating a sea urchin sushi. But with the yam in the shooter that created the slimy texture, it was just not right. Even though with the freshness of the sea urchin in the shooter, the whole thing was rather tasteless.
Next, we had the Hamachi Carpaccio. This dish came with Hamachi along with salad vegetable and garlic oil drizzled on top. It was very delicious, but rather nothing surprising. At this point, we all know that garlic oil goes very well all kind of fish and we have tried this in many japanese restaurants. One thing I want to point out is that the fish at Kingyo was not very fresh. JW tried to taste pieces of fish on its own and said it wasn't fresh; it was the flavour added to it that covered up the lack of freshness in the fish.
Then, we had the Stone Bowl Seafood Sea Urchin Don. This was also one of the dishes we looked forward to the most. Like sea urchin in a bowl of rice, can our lives get better? But, we were disappointed again. Although there was a generous amount of sea urchin sitting on top, the seafood don lacked a directing flavour; the seafood don had a very light soya sauce taste with a hint of vinegar. However, it was not strong enough to tie all the ingredients together. They were more like individual pieces that were put together by accident and did not really go together.
We also ordered the Aburi Toro & Avocado 2Tone Battera, which we expected to highly resemble Jabistro's ebi and salmon oshizushi. Yet, we were wrong again. The Toro wasn't fresh. The balance of rice and fish was off and there was too much rice. Although there was a sauce that tasted like vinegar and a hint of garlic oil, the sushi was extremely tasteless. Very disappointed.
Lastly, we had two sushi rolls from today's special menu. I forgot their names but I think they were spicy scallop roll and beef tataki roll. These rolls did its job by wrapping our meal with disappointment.
Expected the spicy scallop roll to taste like Blue Ocean Roll from ND sushi, the spiciness from mixing mayo with sriracha sauce was blunt and tasted exactly like spicy sashimi rolls found in all japanese bentos. Totally not worth the $10 or even more.
The sauce on the beef tataki roll was quite surprising and went pretty well with the fried noodles-like thing on top. But the beef was tough and hard-bitten.
verdict:
not roasted
We entered the restaurant with excitement and left with disappointed. Everything was very disappointing. We will not come back for sure.
visit http://theroastedacorn.com/2013/03/18/kingyo-izakaya/ for awesome pictures of the food i mentioned :)
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)