(Credit to The Grid's Karon Liu, who was the first, and until recently only city food writer to feature the place.) The first time I ate there, I was one of just five people at the counter. He sold Nigiri-Ya last fall and took the plunge. 'For Japanese, when you think sushi, it's just fish and rice,' he said. Yet what he's always loved most is straight-up Edomae-style sushi, made and served to order. He came to Toronto in 2009 and opened a takeout counter in Leaside called Nigiri-Ya. He spent the first five years of his thirties in Australia, much of that time at modernist sushi king Nobu Matsuhisa's Melbourne branch. Ouchi, who is 40, began his sushi training in Osaka when he turned 16, he said. While I've had that experience at a sushi counter in Tokyo and another in Vancouver, I had never before felt it here.

(Both of these happened to me at Sushi Kaji earlier this week.)īoth times I ate at Yasu, the progression of fish and the pace of the evening sent me into a seafood-induced bliss-state. There's no filler here, no salad or noodles to arrive just as you're about to get to the Tasmanian sea trout no wagyu beef sukiyaki sizzling at the counter space next to you so that all you can smell is aerosolized fat. Yet what's extraordinary about eating here, beyond all the fish's tastes and textures and remarkably different characters, is how the focus and the pace of the meal – one piece at a time – encourage you to do something that people too often forget when eating sushi: to think about what you're eating. Where you might be expecting your usual sardines' greasy pong, at Yasu they are fresh enough to taste disarmingly mild: rich and dark-flavoured, umami-dense and meltingly light, without even a hint of fishy.Īnd as with everything else here, they are beautiful also: Those sardines appear as whole shimmering fillets, topped with a daub of ginger and a tiny green tangle of scallion shavings, lain out on a bed of cloud-like white rice. Ouchi's sardine sushi, to name just one, is to forever banish anything you knew about oily-fleshed seafood. urchin, and Gaspé scallops on the half-shell lately, in addition to many other less common sushi species. The chef has had Pacific spot prawns, live Maine and B.C. The scallops are warmed with a blowtorch and brightened with sour-floral pepper seasoned with summer yuzu they melt as you eat them, almost like ice cream from the sea. All the fish is seasoned when you get it you won't be needing a bowl of soy sauce to dunk it in. Ouchi prepares it a bit at a time by rubbing a gnarled-looking piece of the root on a sharkskin grater). There will be grouper from South Carolina, sweet and buttery with a minor wasabi backnote (the wasabi is fresh, of course Mr. It might start with an ivory slice of Japanese amberjack, its texture almost apple-crisp, its flavour clean, brushed lightly with nikiri (sweetened soy sauce), and set on gently roasty-tasting rice. All but two pieces come served over just-warm rice. The décor is suitably minimalist for a place with such laser-focus: There is little more here than an L-shaped counter, 10 comfortable stools and an open glass icebox where the fish is kept.Īt Yasu, there is only one menu option: for $80, you get 20-odd pieces of pristine sushi, cut right there in front of you. Yasu, as the room is called, is bright and modern, wide glass out to Harbord's stream of summer bicyclists. What we didn't have was a sushi counter that did nothing but top-quality sushi: that served only just-warm, vinegar-seasoned rice draped with superlative fish, made to order right in front of you and served a single bite at a time.Įarly this May, an Osaka-raised chef named Yasuhisa Ouchi quietly opened just such a spot on Harbord Street. There are big-box-sized rooms where the sushi comes in wooden boats, as well as pressed-sushi purveyors, hybrid sushi-ya-izakayas, an arriviste new Vancouver-style spot where the fish is great (but what they do with it isn't), and a place where they seem to think that deep-fried sushi pizza is an extremely good idea.īut until this past spring, what the city didn't have was the sort of sushi restaurant that you might have seen in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. We've seen new pan-Asian spots where they'll wrap your futomaki rolls in Thai black rice, new all-you-can-eat joints ( caveat you've-got-to-be-crazy), a 'sustainable' sushi counter, vegetarian sushi businesses, aburi-style specialists where nearly everything comes blowtorched, and restaurants where you pluck your sushi from a conveyor belt and hope it's on its first time around. Amid the rush of new sushi restaurants into the city these past few years, there's always been a conspicuous absence.

Yasu toronto review