Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Tokyo Sushi

The Engineer and I tried this restaurant last Saturday, at 1805 Sainte-Catherine West (it’s the same owners – and menu – as Nagoya Sushi and Thai & Pho), the location of the late Saffron. It serves Japanese food and Thai food. We were hoping to take advantage of their all-you-can-eat lunch special for $13.99 per person. We were given a table, but then had to reach over to the neighbours’ table for the menu – and another time for the little pieces of paper and pencils to fill out our order. Not invasive at all! And as is to be expected, the menu is littered with typos in both languages: “appetizer” has even been made into a verb, “appeterize”, which is identical in French.

Our first go-around was a learning experience. Apparently, one order corresponds to one piece. So we had one dumpling, one little unagi nigiri, one avocado nigiri... We rectified that with a second order. I’ll spare you the details, here’s the abridged version: the meal took so damn long that we actually had to cancel our afternoon plans (and it’s not like the restaurant was full by 3pm, believe me). The food wasn’t good, either. I’ve said this before about Asean Garden, but I feel like most restaurants that do every type of food end up doing nothing particularly well. The difference is that I can actually enjoy a meal at Asean Garden.

In this case, if you want a lunch deal for sushi, spend an extra $3.00 and go to Odaki a few doors down (1836 Sainte-Catherine West); it’s better, faster, and you have a conveyor belt as a bonus.

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