This was not the first time that I vis­ited this Japan­ese restau­rant. They offer a pretty good vari­ety of authen­tic Japan­ese dishes — not only sushi. They have a nicely designed web­site too, click here. This day, I went with a friend. “Tsuk­iji” is actu­ally the name of the famous Japan­ese fish mar­ket. The restau­rant had a nice Japan­ese style wooden inte­rior with an open sushi bar.

One of our favourite appe­tiz­ers was the salmon tar­tar. It had a nice soy sauce flavour and the quail egg yolk adds a rich­ness to the tar­tar. It was served with a roasted unflavoured nori (sea­weed). I could also taste a hint of gin­ger and gar­lic, salmon was very fresh. It kind of melts in your mouth — delicious.

Salmon Tar­tar $8.50

We also ordered sushi, we wanted to try their rolled sushi so we ordered their House Roll and Avo­cado Tuna Roll. We espe­cially loved the Avo­cado Tuna Roll because the tex­ture is just so creamy and but­tery. This roll is basi­cally an avo­cado roll topped with chopped tuna and tiny wedge of lemon. We also liked that the lemon flavour was so refresh­ing and it cuts back a bit of the but­tery tex­ture. It is sim­ple but the sub­tle flavours worked well.

Avo­cado Tuna Roll $8.95

The House Roll was also good — it is rolled with prawn tem­pura, topped with unagi (roasted eel), avo­cado and masago (capelin roe). There is many kinds of tex­tures and flavours — crispy, but­tery, rich­ness of the unagi and salti­ness of the masago. They all went well together, I was glad that it was not a huge chunk of sushi (like served in some restau­rants) where you have to fin­ish one piece in two or more bites and then it just becomes messy. So I am not a big fan of super huge sushi rolls. Even with all these ingre­di­ents, I was able to eat a piece with just one bite and enjoy the com­bi­na­tion of flavours and tex­tures together.

House Roll $10.95

We also ordered some Robata (grilled) items too — Yak­i­nasu (grilled egg­plant) and the Salmon Enoki. The Yak­i­nasu was one of their fall sea­sonal items. It is actu­ally a charred egg­plant where the charred skin is removed, topped with shaved dried bonito and a mild soy sauce. We really enjoyed the egg­plant, again, sim­ple but deli­cious. The egg­plant still had the smok­i­ness of the charred skin which paired well with the smok­i­ness of the shaved bonito flakes. It also had a soft vel­vety texture.

Yak­i­nasu (grilled egg­plant) $4.95

The Salmon Enoki took a long time — we fin­ished all the other dishes and waited for this one, we had to ask our server if it was ever ordered. Any­ways, it came at the end. We didn’t enjoy this one too much. When we ordered it I didn’t expect the ‘salmon’ part of it was actu­ally the salmon skin wrapped around enoki mush­rooms. So it tasted very “fishy” because the skin had a lot of oil from the fish, which was where the flavour was com­ing from. The sauce was not bad though but it is def­i­nitely too fishy for us. (If the salmon was replaced with bacon or some other sliced meat — yum!)

Salmon Enoki $4.95

Con­clu­sion:

Ambi­ence: 3.5/5
Food: 4/5
Ser­vice: 3.5/5
Value: 3 (por­tions were small with prices on the higher side)