The dish above is at my favourite Japanese restaurant in Vancouver (balancing price, quality of dishes, originality, and of course restaurant service and atmosphere). Three years ago, I would have waved the dish away, prefering the simplicity of salmon or tuna rolls. Mayo ontop of a roll? Well, actually, Japanese mayo is quite tasty. Cheese!? Japanese cheesecake is to die for. It’s a roll with character, the character of its Japanese chef that defies our stereotypes of Japanese as a raw-fish-eating culture.
However, my favourite roll is, surprisingly, in West Vancouver, close to home. More appalling is its name: Kate Roll, off the menu, in a discrete little restaurant off of the district’s commercial strip. I get the impression this honoured patron is Caucassian, and therefore once upon a time would have been labled unauthentic. But authentic or not, it had all my favourite ingredients, which actually worked well together. It’s not sushi, nor did it have a piece of sashimi in it. My cravings for sashimi died in Toronto, where for 3 years I was denied good quality raw fish.
Those of you who have met me, particular those from Toronto, will know I am a sushi snob. I barely ate sushi 3 times while I was in that city. However, it was also in that city that I ventured beyond my staple salmon roll, since I had to find a roll that had nothing to do with the terrible, and overly priced raw fish there. Vancouver gave me a love of food, while Toronto taught me an appreciation for quality.
Sushi is a fine comparison between the two cities. Sushi symbolized three things, that did not conflict while I was growing up in Vancouver: 1) the time spent with friends, 2) the satisfaction of craving for raw fish, and 3) the satisfaction of a craving for good food. In Toronto, raw fish is rarely good food simply because it is not beside the sea. In Vancouver, it is not necessarily good food, but it rarely gets outright bad. At least one has the choice between blood red, flaky, lean, soft, smoky wild salmon and the abundant orange-white band oily blobs in Vancouver. It would be rediculous to compromise the time spent with friends over an orange piece of rubber. On the other hand, I am too petty to compromise my morals over enjoying food for friends. So my compromise was to discover dragon and spider rolls and the like. Thankfully, since Toronto’s sushi wasteland was my exploration ground, when I returned to Vancouver with this new culinary courage, I was able to fully appreciate a new little restaurant on Denman street that offered delightfully original Japanese dishes such as the dishes here. The deconstructed shrimp wontons were a great balance between fragrant (almond slices), crispy, creamy (the mayo), and hot/spicy (to counter some of the heaviness), and crunchy (jumbo shrimp).
However, Toronto is far from a culinary wasteland. My best kaiseki experience happens to be in the revolting concrete dessert of Mississauga.