Restaurant review: Sushi purists find a little heaven at Marpole's Sushi Bar Shu
Credit to Author: Mia Stainsby| Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2019 18:00:47 +0000
Where: 8099 Granville Street, 604-428-1868
Open: Tuesday to Sunday for dinner. facebook.com/sushibarshu
The Marpole neighbourhood kept hitting that snooze button but hey now, wakey, wakey, people. There’s a very good Japanese restaurant in the ‘hood. Especially if you’re a sushi purist.
Sushi Bar Shu opened last December offering an omakase-only menu with owner/chef Kevin Shin aiming for perfection. (Shu means excellence in Japanese.)
He cooked at some of Toronto’s top Japanese restaurants including Zen, a kaiseki restaurant. He’s studied udon making and launched an udon shop for another investor and was about to open one for his mentor at Zen. But when his wife became pregnant, they moved to Vancouver, her hometown. Hurrah!
Before opening Sushi Bar Shu, Shin was the opening sushi chef at Parq Vancouver’s Victor restaurant, where operators Elizabeth Blau and Kim Cantawalla supported his thirst to learn.
“They sent me to Las Vegas to meet legendary sushi chefs.” At Victor, he met Denny Park, who’s now his sous chef.
Sushi Bar Shu owner Kevin Shin, right; and sous chef Denny Park.
There are two seatings — 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. — at this compact 16-seat restaurant, and the sushi bar is where you want to be. There are eight seats at the bar where you can witness the chefs’ reverence for fish and their hand ballet as they assemble onigiri sushi.
You choose from a $68 or $98 omakase menu, the latter with extra courses of three appetizers, sashimi and dessert. Both include chawanmushi, miso soup, 12 pieces of sushi and a handroll.
Shin decided to do omakase because the small kitchen lacks ventilation, limiting what he can cook. Given his druthers, he would have opened an udon bar but Vancouver’s lengthy permitting process discouraged him. He’s still waiting for a liquor permit, and until that’s secured he charges $20 corkage.
The 12-piece sushi course is done in classic edomae style, simply, with cornerstones of seasonality and quality. Most of his fish is from Toyosu Fish Market (the new location of Tsukiji Market) and Tsubaki Market in Nagoya and, despite contacts who send him the best fish, he picks out the best of the best for the sushi.
The fish nigiri might be lightly lacquered with premium soy sauce or a fine grating of yuzu rind. He might salt and pour hot water over thin-skinned fish and blowtorch the skin to add flavour. Or he might slip a paper-thin piece of white kelp over another to cure, firm and add flavour.
To vinegar the rice, he sourced a premium akasu (red) vinegar, fermented from sake lees and aged.
“No one was using it here so I had hard time finding it,” he says.
It has colour and deep aroma. He also found most sushi chefs use ginger sweetened with aspartame. “I found one using sugar. Much better,” he says.
A rice warmer keeps the rice at an ideal and consistent temperature.
“From first bite to last, temperature should be same. If cooled, taste changes,” he says.
The $98 omakase began with sea bream sashimi, then a trio of appetizers — soy sauce marinated black cod, slow-cooked beef tongue in hatcho miso, and seaweed with ikure and shrimp in ponzu sauce.
Mackerel nigiri sushi.
The 12-piece parade of sushi followed a chawan mushi and miso soup course: Yellowtail blue snapper with a sprinkle of salt and yuzu zest. Japanese soldier fish with artisan Kishibori soy sauce. Grunt fish with yuzu zest. Amberjack needed no enhancing. Crimson sea bream, skin torched to enhance flavour. Striped horse mackerel with soy. Hokkaido scallop, meltingly luscious. Two battleship rolls (gunkan, where nori is wrapped like a boat around the rice and seafood), one with uni and another with ikura. Bluefin tuna (chutoro grade) scored to fit the curve of the rice. Brined mackerel with braised white kelp.
Battleship roll (gunkan) with ikura (salmon roe).
Tamago cake (atsu yaki tamago) segues towards dessert. It’s tricky for chef to make in his small Combi oven and required weeks of testing. The dish, with blended white fish, shrimp, mountain potato, dashi, sake, salt, sugar, eggs was delicate and yummy. Lastly, blue fin tuna head meat, chopped together with belly fat, mixed with green onion, grated sesame and served in a hand roll.
Dessert was an orb of shiso sorbet with cubes of shiso jelly.
Shiso sorbet with shiso jelly.
Not all was perfect. The nigiri sushi are individually and unceremoniously served on a black ceramic dish without regard to placement; at times, the fish hung over the side. And the ginger on the plate (replenished when needed) leaked juices and ran toward the nigiri. A couple of pieces of fish, though pristine, had a streak of sinew I couldn’t chew through. I mention this because it stood out in the parade of wonderful seafood.
Before dessert, Shin asks if guests want to order more and throws out suggestions. There’s also A5 Miyazaki Wagyu beef (the highest grade) on the menu for $86. Nearly everyone at the counter ordered more nigiri sushi, and one couple, the wagyu.
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