Tapas Archives - Page 4 of 4

In North Burnaby

Sushimoto

December 31, 2010

Sushimoto is located beside Holdom Skytrain on the Millenium Line. It is literally a few steps away. Since BusanGirl was going back to Korea for vacation. A few of us met up and enjoy some sushi. NotFauna decided to choose Sushimoto since it seemed pretty popular online. It was really close to our houses, so we went.

The interior was really nice! paper lantern decorations, many little samurai figurines near the kitchen. There was actually MANY MANY figurines ranging from samurai swords to traditional masks.

Salmon Sashimi (Half Order) ($6). A half order contains about 5 pieces. The pieces are not as big as Sushi Town, but the quality is pretty good.

Tuna Tataki ($12.90) was really good. It was nicely seared on the outside. This dish came with organic salad, shaved onions, and topped with garlic chips, green onions and ponzu sauce. The ponzu sauce was perfect for the dish and went well with the tuna and salad.

Moto Signature Roll ($9) has Tuna, salmon, cucumber, avacado, egg, crab meat, masago, and carrot. It is topped with spicy-mayo sauce and wrapped is soybean skin. At first it seemed cool that it was wrapped in soybean skin rather than seaweed, but the skin was pretty thin and all the ingredients inside kept falling out. Great tasting roll, but fell apart too easily.

Amusement Roll ($10) has cream cheese, cucumber, salmon, egg, crab meat, ikura, Mayo and unagi sauce. This roll held together better than the Moto Signature Roll. The roll was pretty average and the addition of the cream cheese made this interesting. Other restaurants usually have it in the philadelphia roll. The cream cheese worked well!

Overall, the food was good and the decor was great. Unfortunately, the service was pretty bad. We all agreed that the waitress was pretty awkward. When she described the specials, we were left more confused by what she said. Perhaps she was new and a bit shy.

Words of Wisdom:

Street Parking
Large variety in menu
Sashimi = good!

We rate Sushimoto:

They are located at:

2221 Holdom Ave S
Burnaby, BC

In Chinese

Terracotta Modern Chinese

December 28, 2010

I have always been fascinated by the thought of modern chinese cuisine. Could this be possible? After hearing much about Terracotta Modern Chinese Restaurant on Urbanspoon and Twitter. It was something I needed to try in the future with a few gal pals.

I heard a bit of controversy between this restaurant and a UBC Student Club…lets just say it didn’t look good at all. I saw a Groupon for Terracotta Modern Chinese Restaurant the following day and just had to purchase it to see what this place really was like.

Since this place was best known for drinks, I thought I would take CandiedZen to celebrate her birthday.

The interior is pretty cool! It has a bunch of statues of Terracotta warriors. Sometimes I find I am creepily amused by Chinese statues. Being a totally whitewashed asian…It’s quite interesting and I wish I could have a statue on my desk.

The waitress started me and CandiedZen with some ice waters as we pondered over the menu.

For my drink I ordered the Chivas & Green Tea ($9). It came in a cool asian style cup. I had no idea what Chivas was, but it seemed like they heavily promoted that certain type of alcohol at the restaurant, so I didn’t think it would disgust me. Turns out Chivas is Whisky from Scotland. At first slip, I really did not like this drink. It was just tea and whisky! After eating a bit of food, it matched well with the dishes. and I slowly began to enjoy it.

CandiedZen ordered the Me-So-H69ny ($9.50). Yes, that is the name of this drink! Sounded hilarious and made us giggle a bit. This drink contained Raspberry Stoli, Red Alize, Cranberry Juice and a lychee. This was a really good drink. The drink is more on the sweet side and not too strong in terms of alcohol taste.

For our first dish, we ordered the Golden Squid ($8). It contained marinated squid, bettered and seasoned with salt. It also had garlic, jalapeno and some type of fruity salsa. This was one of our favorite dishes.

We next ordered the Terracotta Spring Rolls ($7), which has inside – tuna, mango and peppers. At first, the taste was quite bizarre. THe better did not match the taste of the tuna. Maybe if they used something else like maybe… avocados, it would be better.

Nest we ordered the Terracotta Short Rib Sliders ($9). It had braised beef short ribs with green onion served on golden mantou buns. CandiedZen and I agreed, it was actually “modern chinese”. They took the ingredients you would find in a chinese restaurant and add a twist. The braised beef was very tender and the sauce accompanied great as well. It had 3 pieces.

The last dish we had was the Barbecue Duck Wraps ($8). It came in 3 pieces and in each one was BBQ duck, hoisin sauce, green onion, and cucumber. CandiedZen commented how this dish as quite oily and assumed it was because the duck had a lot of fat in it. One thing which I think would make the dish amazing if it was more of a “do it yourself” type of wrap so customers can put in how much onions or cucumber to it because some people are picky about green onions.

Overall, Terracotta Modern Chinese caters to a very specific type of crowd of people – The young, hip, enjoys drinking and a lounge setting. I was clearly not their target market, as Follow Me Foodie has said several times in her posts. Growing up eating mass amounts of Chinese food, I am basically trained to gravitate towards dim sum restaurants or family style chinese restaurants.

Words of Wisdom:

Do not expect this place to be a traditional chinese restaurant
Sliders are highly recommended
Best to drink and have a few dishes
Pay parking on streets

We rate Terracotta Modern Chinese:

Website: http://www.terracottavancouver.com/

Address:

52 Alexander St.
Vancouver, BC

In Four Beakers

Toratatsu

November 29, 2010

Toratstau is slowly becoming my favorite Izakaya restaurant. They are located near Robson and Denman. They have a good variety of choices to choose from. The downside about this place is that it’s quite small, so reservations are a must on busy days like Friday and Saturday.

In their menu, if you are indecisive, they have a set course for 2. It basically gives you a taste test of everything on the menu. I had this a few months ago. M and I basically fell in love with Toratasu after having the set course. It did cost us a total of $60…but for that amount of items, it was decently priced compared to the other Izakaya restaurants. Today we didn’t order this, so sorry no pics.

M and the men has the bamboo sake ($9.50). It comes in a really cool bamboo container. Even the little cups are made of bamboo. The sake does come cold rather than the traditional hot sake. The guys said hot sake tastes better than cold ones. But we all try things for the experience, so now they can always tell people the story of when they had sake from a bamboo shoot.

FragileBoy and InsecureGirl ordered the Sashimi Platter($15.80). It’s really cool that they give you a little “show” to your meal. They bring over a blowtorch to sear the top of the makerel.

The Ebi Mayo ($8.00) is THE BEST ebi mayo we have ever had! The battered prawns give the sense that these prawn are bigger than they really are. Its not a bad thing, but the batter does give it more body and more of the mayo sauce covers the shrimp. Each Ebi Mayo even comes with a fried wonton skin. For about $2 a piece, it does seem very pricy, but it is the best ebi mayo ever and I would pay for this every time!

I got the SukiYaki Hot Pot ($14.00ish). Apparently it serves 2, but I just ate it all myself. I know, it may seem piggish but there really wasn’t that much to eat. It had barley fed pork, tofu, enoki mushrooms, napa cabbage, and 2 organic eggs. I thought it would be different than Posh, but it tasted quite similar. But, without the “all you can eat” aspect to the dish.

Everything up to this point was fantastic! Dun Dun Dun. It took them about 45 minutes to get the Ishiyaki Risotto ($8.30). It really made us wonder why it was taking so long. Everyone else was maybe 80% done their meal, till their risotto finally arrived. Not really sure what the reasons were, but maybe it was a super busy night and we did order 5 of these.

Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable risotto. It was a bit different than what you would normally expect. This Risotto had seared scallops, mushrooms, Iwanori seaweed served in a hot stone bowl. Yes, in a hot stone bowl. Imagine korean bi bim bap but with risotto.

All in all it was a good experience at Toratasu. For some reason the service started decreasing after half way through our meal. It took us a long time to flag down a waitress for the bill. It took even more time trying to get them to bring the debit/credit machine over. In that whole time of flagging down a waitress, another table wanted to leave but no waitresses in sight. Very puzzled by the odd service since last time we came here, it was great service.

Words of Wisdom:

Best Ebi Mayo in town!
Parking at back of restaurant, but is usually full
Get reservations on busy nights
Hot Pot is not worth it
Set course menu is good for dates

We rate Toratatsu:

Check out their website: http://www.toratatsutapas.com/

In Japanese

Hapa Izakaya (Kitsilano)

November 26, 2010

Hapa Izakaya in Kitsilano is a great late night place to go for tapas. M, FragileBoy, InsecureGirl and I wanted something light and not too heavy to end the day. After contemplating many choices, we chose Hapa on Kits!

The interior is really intimate with candles and it’s dark appearance. As the rumour goes, yes, Hapa has some pretty girl servers. To think about it…I don’t think I saw any waiters…only waitresses. Imagine going on a date and the guy keeps staring at the waitresses…that wouldn’t be cool.

There were a lot of menu’s on our table. I guess they have a lot of specials and seasonal dishes.

When asked what we wanted to start off with, we asked if they had Asahi Black ($6.50). Indeed they did! So we ordered 4.

We started off with Beef Tataki ($7.95). This was a bit different that what I usually imagine. It had hot sauce on it instead of the usual ponzu sauce. I didn’t particularly like this dish. If you are into hot sauce, you may enjoy this dish.

We next had the Negitoro ($7.95). It is blended toro and onion. It also has i think either ponzu sauce or soy sauce. You would first mix up the ingredients so you get an even coating of sauce when you divide up the dish. This was soooo good! We have to order 2 places cause we all wanted more!

Spicy Scallop Roll ($7.95) was just average. Nothing exceptional about this roll. I could have been more spicy. Inside the roll there was spicy scallops and cucumber. If you call it “spicy”, you gotta make it SPICY!

Next we had the Salmon Risotto croquette ($6.95). It had 5 balls and they contained shitake mushrooms, salmon+ Dashi Risotto and drizzled with mayo. This as surprisingly filling. The risotto didn’t taste like risotto since it was in a different form.

The Wild Prawn Ebi Mayo ($8.95). Tempura prawns with spicy mayo sauce. The prawns were a bit small for my liking. I still believe you can’t beat the ebi mayo at Toratatsu and Guu.

Smoked Gindara ($11.00) smoked sable fish. The sable fish was perfectly done! It was nice, moist and the skin was nice and crunchy.

King Crab Roll ($11.95) I thought was expensive and overrated. You can’t really taste the full flavour of the king crab with all the other ingredients in the way.

We also got the Sashi Mori ($19.95) which is basically assorted sushi. It had 4 pieces of scallops, salmon, tuna, and some other type of fish. The quality was pretty good, but for that price, it was so not worth it.