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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

Conclusion:

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