Torafuku is located on Main Street right outside Chinatown in Vancouver. The restaurant is opened by Le Tigre food truck owners Clement Chan and Steve Kuan.
The 48-seat modern-Asian restaurant delivers bold interpretations on flavours traditionally found in Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cuisine. Every plate features seasonal ingredients, straight from local farmers. Torafuku’s menu is designed for sharing. Dishes are playful yet skillfully prepared.
They don’t take reservations, so it’s first come first serve.
Torafuku is open from Tuesday to Sunday for dinner, starting at 5:30 p.m.
33 Acres of Sunshine, Blanche ($6) is one of their beers on top. It is a French blanchè ale lightly hopped with Styrian Golding and flavoured with orange peel, coriander, and anise. It was a nice light beer to go with the meal.
Cocchi-Doodle Cobbler ($12) has BeefEater Gin, cocchi americano, hibiscus, Osmanthus, raspberries, and mandarin orange. This was recommended by the waitress.
Torafuku Ramen ($12) has braised duck leg, bean sprouts, leeks, scallions, seasonal veggies, yummy tonkotsu broth, fried egg. The broth was pretty good and the ramen was really packed with a lot of ingredients. I thought the noodles were ok, but I much prefer firm ramen noodles.
Dr. Octopus vs Mr Tuna ($12) has a pretty unique name, which compelled us to order the dish. on one side there is the octopus salad with tomato, jalapenos, scallions, and crispy nori. On the other side, you have the tuna crudo with romesco sauce.
I enjoyed the octopus as it was very tender. The tuna wasn’t as tasty.
Rye So Messy Chicken Wings ($12) was crowned the 2015 Chicken Fight Best Dish — rye and gochujang marinate, mango glaze, ramen crumble, KFC sauce. You can really taste the stronger gochujang sauce in the chicken wings. The wings were ok, but I left there were too many things going on in this dish.
Calamari Done The Right Way ($10) uses Humboldt squid, onion, tomato, lychee, arugula, and a sweet chilli dressing. The dish was ok, but the star of the dish – calamari fell a bit flat.
Brown Cow ($13) has Shaoxing braised oxtail, tomato, shiitake, cabbage, basil, fried egg, and sticky rice cake. This is comfort food right here. I personally didn’t like the rice cakes since they don’t soak up the delicious sauce from the dish.
Overall, we found the food was very well presented but the flavours were lacking. There wasn’t a a dish that we thought was outstanding. The service was ok, but we did find a fly in one of our beers, so we scooped it out and showed it to our waitress. She didn’t offer us a new drink out of courtesy which was odd.
We Rate Torafuku:
Address:
958 Main Street, Vancouver
Website:
http://torafuku.ca/