or: Judging a restaurant by how it serves its condiments

Everyone that moves locations, whether a neighbourhood, state / province or country, always has various foods and / or cafes / restaurants they miss from their former location(s).

I have a few things I miss and one of those is good quality Japanese food.

I will be the first to admit that I am a bit of a Japanese food snob and will put that down to being quite spoilt in HK as that has some awesome Japanese restaurants and had my Japanese food snobbery reinforced during my time living in Japan.

I lie.

Living there made me even worse.

Anyway, I’m not averse to a good quality Sushi Train as these are fun and when the food is fresh and made well, I’m not going to say no. 

I digress. This is not a post about Sushi Trains.

If the wasabi is wrapped / packaged (Sushi Train or otherwise), that is when my first doubts start to kick in.

Those trained to be Sushi Chefs undergo a hardcore apprenticeship before they are considered qualified to prepare food for customers. It focuses on the freshness and quality of the ingredients, the preparations required, the flavour combinations and the aesthetics. 

This process usually takes around ten years.

Since living in Mauritius, I have been on a hunt for great Japanese food.

My first place was a recommendation from one of our diving buddies for sushi. She loves this place.

They had a very simple menu which is no way to judge a Japanese restaurant as it is not uncommon for places to specialise in particular styles of Japanese cuisine.

We ordered sushi and some various other bits and pieces.

And out came wasabi in packets.

What made it even worse was the packets were very difficult to open.

The food was ok.

We haven’t been back.

Then lockdown hit so that was three months without trying anywhere new.

Last week I was at a totally different part of the island. It’s one that’s a bit of a pain to get to at the moment due to road works and construction of the metro.

Lunchtime rolled around and those I was with were trying to decide where we should eat. I’d seen this restaurant sign on the way so suggested there with the fallback that there were other restaurants nearby given it was in a shopping centre.

I don’t take the location as any indicator of quality as many of the restaurants in HK are in shopping centres.

We headed up and checked out the menu. I saw various Bento Boxes and I was excited. 

There was also some sushi options and a few other bits and pieces too.

It was enough to entice us into their bamboo enclosure.

I decided on a teriyaki chicken with tempura vegetables, rice and some sashimi with a miso starter.

The soup came out beautifully presented and tasted fantastic.

Next came the Bento box.

Happy days! It looked good and tasted even better.

Except for the sashimi.

It was served on ice which is standard however the fish was too cold so each piece tasted exactly like the last with slightly different textures. 

The rest however was awesome.

I thought I’d finally found a place for me to go when I craved Japanese until I remembered how long it took us to get there.

I will have to know that I’m going to want Japanese a day in advance so I can plan a road trip!

Conveniently though, there is a new Japanese restaurant opening up closer to home.

Hopefully they have fresh wasabi.

 

Thanks to Lee Harding for the title to this post.