T.O.bites | Toronto Food & Restaurant Blog

Japanese restaurants really are a dime a dozen in Toronto and it’s hard to distinguish one from the other.  I eat at Japanese restaurants a lot.  And by ‘a lot’ I mean at least 3 or 4 times a week.  Usually I’ll snap photos and just end up passing on the review because there wasn’t anything particularly bad or good that I needed to share.

So why did I decide to review Sushi Club all of a sudden.  Cause of the mean staff? Nope.  Because of the cramped restaurant seating? Not that reason either, although it is cramped.  Then why? Because their Oyako Don is that good!

It’s my first night meeting up with Sara since she first came back from the UK for a three week long excursion of the english countryside.  We decided to meet up at the very place where we left off the day she left – Sushi Club.  Sushi Club sits on Charles St just south of the Manulife Centre a few doors down from Okonomiyaki (which I so need to go review.  I miss having one of their “pancakes”) hidden from the bright Yonge street lights.  This makes it a nice quiet place and usually means that even though there aren’t too many tables there, you never have to wait long to be seated.

After eating nothing but literally potatoes and red meat for the past 3 weeks, Sara decided to go with a vegetable plentiful bowl of sukiyaki.  I went with, as you may have guessed already, the oyako don.  I’ve been to Sushi Club about 5 or 6 times in the past but I’ve never ordered their oyako don before so I thought I’d give it a try.

Sara’s sukiyaki did come with a lot of vegetables, mainly of the fungii variety, but also came with a lot of boiled tofu pieces which she’s not a fan of (food texture issues).  She said her sukiyaki was a bit on the salty side but overall the broth was pretty tasty, and all the vegetables were plentiful and yummy.

Now as for my oyako don, it was freekin awesome.  It’s such a simple dish but everything about it makes it one of the best oyako dons in town.  I also absolutely loved the cast iron bowl it was served in as well.  It kept it warm for quite a while.  So why was it so much more awesome than other oyako dons?  It’s the sauce they use in it.  It’s sort of a sweet but savory brown sauce that they use, which we couldn’t quite put our fingers on what it’s called.  It’s almost like teriyaki sauce but not quite.  You’d have to taste it yourself to see what I mean.  It has just the right amount of sweetness to it too although I’m sure that may turn a lot of people off, the ones who don’t like apple sauce with their pork chops.

Would I recommend Sushi Club over other sushi places?  It’s hard to say.  Natural Sushi around the corner on Yonge has a lot cheaper dishes which are all generally good.  And you can’t really beat Masa Sushi’s all you can eat, just on the other side of Yonge.  But if oyako don is what your is poison, then I really recommend you check theirs out at least once.

Average Price: $6 – $8 per entree
Hours: weekdays 11:30am – 10:30pm, weekends noon-10:30pm
Address: 41 Charles St. W.
Phone: 416-967-3388
TTC Directions: Get off at Yonge/Bloor station and exit out into Yonge street.  Walk south a block to Charles St. then walk west half a block on the south side.

An egg is carefully flipped through the air, lands directly onto the side metal spatula, cracking right down the center and releasing its contents upon the hot grill.  A quick round of polite applause emanates from the peanut gallery who are eagerly awaiting their food.  The chef then passes bean sprouts around the table onto the plates, calling it “Japanese spaghetti”.  This gets a few hints of a chuckle from the patrons.

Maybe I’m over glorifying the display of having a chef prepare teppanyaki right in front of you, but eating at Yamato easily ranks as one of my top 3 food experiences, and I was glad to enjoy it with the good company of my good friends, Zam and Antony.

Right in the heart of Yorkville, near the corner of Cumberland and Bellair, Yamato may be easy to overlook, not so much due to it being halfway underground, but because it sits within an area of high end trendy restaurants, many of them Japanese.  What makes Yamato so unique is that it is one of the few Japanese steak houses in Toronto.  This helps it stand out above the hundreds of sushi restaurants already scattered throughout the city.

It was my first time having a chef prepare your meal from scratch right in front of you, at your own table.  I’ve seen it done in TV many times (who hasn’t?) but to actually have them do it right in front of you was amazing.  They’re very well trained at both being quick with their hands, and at being charismatic, or at least ours was with his jokes and sly puns he tossed at us through the night.  From flipping uncracked eggs, to setting an onion boat aflame, this guy did it all.

But enough about the chef, let’s talk about the food!  For drinks, you’re offered the usual serving of tea and given a wine list, but Zam and I decided to each order a mix of a juice and a soda.  I chose a combination of pineapple and soda water, while Zam went with cranberry soda.

For starters, we ordered a set of shrimp tempura, some sushi, and a plate of gyoza.  I can’t really tell you too much about the quality of the shrimp tempura since shellfish does happen to be one of my allergies, but I can tell you that I only looked away for a minute, and the plate was empty.  The gyoza was amazing, and thoroughly fried all around.  Whenever I order gyoza at a sushi restaurant, I notice that it usually has a plastic-like after taste to it, but this was not the case with the ones I had tonight.

We each ordered our own teppanyaki combination dinner, which is slightly more costly then the standard teppanyaki dinners.  I ordered the Teriyaki special set which not very adventerous of me though as it comes with a U.S. choice cut sirloin, and teriyaki chicken.  Zam went with the Imperial set, which comes with filet mignon, shrimps, and some teriyaki chicken.  Antony settled on the Daimyo set, which comes prime ribeye steak, scallops, and a lobster tail.  It was also the most expensive of the choices, nearly double the cost of my set.

Each set came with a salad and some Japanese clear onion soup.  The soup was a welcomed change from the miso soup I’m so used to getting when I go to other Japanese restaurants.

So how was the meal after all the preparation?  Excellent.  The sirloin was delicious and melted right in my mouth.  There’s this debate amongst a few of us where steak doesn’t usually melt in your mouth when it’s well-done, only if you get it rare to medium-rare.  But I can tell you this well-done steak one did.  The boneless teriyaki chicken was also excellent, but there was some fat on the chicken pieces I was given.  In case you haven’t been to a Japanese steakhouse before, that they cut up your meat right on the grill into bite size pieces, so it’s easier to eat with your chopsticks.

Antony said his lobster tail was excellent, which just the right amount of flavoring on.  He noted the taste was super fishy even for lobster (but he likes fishy so I guess this is a good thing) and was bursting with flavor from each bite.  Zam’s filet mignon was excellent, and he finished it before I could even grab a photo.

We all left, very impressed by our meal, but not so impressed with the behavior of the gentleman who was seated at the other end of the same table of us, trying to convince his date to come home with him though his displays of hypermasculinity, thankfully failing miserably.  But that’s a tale for another day, or perhaps another website.

Average Price: $20 – $40 per teppanyaki dinner per person, $15 – $25 per entree
Hours: Lunch: Mon-Fri 11:30am – 3pm,  Weekends noon – 3:30pm
Dinner: Mon-Thur 5pm – 11pm, Fri-Sat 4pm – midnight, Sun 4pm-10pm
TTC Directions: Get off at Bay subway station, exit out of the Cumberland exit, follow Cumberland easy to Bellair, and make a left.