Izakaya Food Forever Welcome
(Quick note. ABC-Z on Waratte Ii Tomo tomorrow! As guests, not Telephone Shocking portion.)
My usual habit is to spam on my birthday, but this year, I'm a bit slow with writing my entries, so I'll just have to deal with one entry that was posted on the actual day of (the previous scans entry) and one that is posted about 90 minutes after the date has changed (this one).
First of all, thank you to everyone who has sent in birthday wishes! I even received a few from people I have never really spoken to, but they have me on their friends list. I will be replying to PMs with a personal thank you later (except for those with privacy options on...).
Since it's a weekday today, I didn't do anything too special. Celebrations happened yesterday, and compared to last year, there was definitely more things going on. Last year, because it was really close to Chinese New Year, we had a gathering more for that reason. This year, Chinese New Year was earlier, so it was a bit different.
This post is mainly about where I had my dinner and post will be heavily about food. Very yummy looking too, so you have been warned. Also a photo of my duffel coat I bought in Buffalo, my cake and stuff!
Yesterday, I made plans with my awesome friend Emi ♥ and we had lunch together before shopping around at Pacific Mall, one of the biggest and most well-known Chinese mall in the city. (Despite that, I always say that I only go there like once a year, which is quite true. My mom doesn't like going to that mall much.) We had Pho for lunch (which wasn't too interesting to take a photo of, especially since I didn't have beef, but cow intestines (tripe, I think that part is called?)) and went shopping afterwards.
There were quite a few things I wanted to get, but obviously had to hold back due to the prices. It's so easy to be charmed by the various clothing and accessories and shoes and bags I came across, but the prices make the whole experience difficult. Including a brief trip to Market Village, another mall right beside P-mall, I ended up getting this hoodie dress, a new hat, as well as a pair of leg warmers. As I mentioned though, I won't be taking photos of these until I receive my package from YesStyle as well (which was just shipped a few hours ago).
Since P-mall has Beard Papa, I had been planning to get a chou cream, but Emi wanted to try this gelato place, so I fell into temptation and got gelato as well. Hers was Ferrero Rocher, while mine was coconut raspberry. Technically speaking if dinner wasn't going to be early, I could have managed a chou cream, but I knew it was both early and filling, so I had to give up. Ah well.
I was picked up by my family at the mall, so after parting with Emi, we headed straight to dinner. The place where I had my birthday dinner is called Fin Izakaya. It's close to Eglinton and Yonge, and it's because where it's located is still considered midtown and not downtown that I was able to try this place. Our family just never would head to downtown, especially just for food.
We were a party of 8 - my family of 4, my cousin, my grandmother (not by blood though), and a family friend and her son. This is my second time going to an izakaya in Toronto, so I'm going to mention briefly my previous experience first.
Last time (this was a while ago), because my mom and sister had to attend this line dance dinner party (not the one at the beginning of this year which I've mentioned, if there are those that remember), I was left with my dad, and we had to figure what we want to eat for. I decided I want to try out the izakaya at J-Town because at least it was close enough (compared to other izakayas). Therefore, we headed to Izakaya Ju to try it out. The photos below include motsuni (stewed pork intestines with yam cake, miso-based), yakitori (salt-flavoured, I believe that's nankotsu (soft bone), sunagimo (gizzard), and negima (chicken thigh meat with leek)), and gindara daikon (black cod and radish simmered in soy sauce-based soup). The dishes are really simple (for the most part, if I remember correctly?) and what I consider to be really traditional izakaya dishes. The atmosphere is a bit lacking though, due to simple lighting (it's not dimmed or anything due to the windows) and the place is rather small, so I wouldn't say you can get a really crowded and active atmosphere, if that makes any sense. I think the food taste good though.
Drinks wise, they had several alcohol choices, including sake and shouchuu. For mixed drinks, it's mainly chuuhai, stuff like that? Nothing fancy.
Going back to Fin Izakaya. The atmosphere is definitely much fancier and has more of a izakaya feel to it, with energetic servers calling out every time people walk in or leave the restaurant. I wouldn't say I was able to completely experience the atmosphere just because we're a party of 8, plus we ordered a party course menu, so we actually sat in a private room.
You can see the party course menu here and we went for the celebrity course one, wanting something a bit more special.
Overall, the pace of the dishes being served was very good. We never had more than two course items on our table, and there was a bit of a gap between the dishes and the nabe, so it did give us some down time. As there was 8 of us, for most dishes, we got two servings of each, which would be logical of course, so we can have our food easily without moving plates around.
You have to order the party course menu ahead of time, so once you're ready, just tell them to serve up the food. The wait time wasn't that long.
We started with 鴨サラダ or the salad with duck meat. The duck meat is obviously about medium rare and very tender, so it was great. The dressing is gomadare (sesame) and even my mom who doesn't like any of sauces/dressings except for few specific ones (for salads, only oil-based dressings - we've been using sun dried tomato and oregon or something like that since forever), seem to like the sauce, which is a good thing!
While we're finishing our salad, came 豚の角煮 or buta no kakuni, which is pork stewed/braised (I think) in this soy sauce-based soup kind of thing. (Is it pork belly meat? I don't remember what that portion is called in English.) Also very tender and tasty. You can really tell that time was spent making this.
Next came 特製炙りしめ鯖 or blowtorched shimesaba (mackerel). They actually bring in the blowtorch and do the burning in front of us! I personally love saba, so this was a wonderful dish, especially when you put the scallions and ginger on top with it. Technically speaking, you're to mix it with the soy sauce, but my cousin and my sister don't like them, so I put them on my own pieces directly instead.
Then came マグロのカルパッチョ or Tuna Carpaccio, Japanese style. Mhhhh~ It was epically awesome, especially if you eat it with the cucumbers and sprouts in the middle.
My cocktail came somewhere between these dishes, and I forgot to immediately take a photo, but yes, my drink! (It's not too focused well, due to lighting and the distance between lens and the drink. Not too big after all.) It's called Shooting Stars and is made from plum wine, cherry liq, grapefruit juice, vodka, and tonic. There are a few other choices, but I made sure to choose one that would use plum wine, or at least something that's Japanese. The cherry flavour felt a bit strong at first, but it's all good once I've gotten used to it.
Next was the awesome ザ!アンガス牛のタタキ or Beef tataki. You dip the meat in ponzu, and mhhhh, ponzu. I like ponzu. Love it, but I can't exactly buy a whole bottle to have in the house because it'll take a long time to finish it, and that's not good.
We then have 揚げ物人気3種盛り合わせ(キス天、手羽先岩塩胡椒、レンコンはさみ揚げ), or a tempura platter! There is kisuten (a type of fish known as kisu (I have no idea what's it called in English, but it's um, white meat fish?) in the middle, then renkon hasami age on the left (lotus root with minced fish meat in between), and chicken wings on the right. You eat the renkon with wasabi soy sauce, and the kisuten with the mustard mayo (or I think it's something like that). The renkon (damn you autocorrect, it's not reckon) wasn't as epic as I thought it might be, but the kisuten was really well fried and I love the mayo sauce.
海からの5点盛 came next, which is just basically a sashimi platter. The tai fish (I think?) is kind of hidden, but ahhhh, the raw scallops and shrimps are so good and fresh! I only eat scallops raw, so haha, it was great.
備長炭焼鶏串、煮込照り焼きソースで, or the chicken skewers definitely have a lot more volume than Izakaya Ju from above! The teriyaki sauce isn't too heavy, so it was pretty good!
Then came our little break because most of the dishes have been served. We have choices for the hot pot and we decided on 寄せ鍋 (yosenabe). The choices available on the menu online is a little off because what they actually offered us was a regular hot pot (which I assume is like shabu shabu), sukiyaki (we decided against it because we can make them at home and we did before), and a seafood and chicken yosenabe, which is what we got. Yosenbae usually uses soy sauce-based soup or even a miso-based, but I think this one uses katsuobushi (bonito flakes) with some soy sauce. Nice and warm and homey, great for the final dish. We chose udon as our shime, or the final um, food? to end our nabe with. No photo of that.
The dessert was 抹茶ロールケーキ or matcha/green tea roll cake. I actually don't like roll cakes very much, usually due to the cream inside, but this one was pretty good! The cream was quite light and the azuki filling helped balance the flavours out as well, so I liked it!
That ends our dinner! It took us nearly about 3 hours to finish the whole course, but it was great. Since it was a private room as well, we can just talk and not really worry about other customers (though my dad got really loud at certain points and it was kind of embarrassing XD; ). The izakaya has this points system which we ended up joining, but to be honest, I have no idea what benefits we get, LOL. I think we ended up drinking 3 bottles of house sake, one cocktail (mine) and two non-alcoholic drinks (pineapple calpis), so with the course menu at $37CAD per person, it was quite the bill, but mhhh, tasty food and fancy at that, you can't really complain! The servers were really nice as well, though depending on who you're talking to, it might not be so easy to communicate in English (is what my family friend said, because they arrived before us, and once I arrived, all communications were done by me in Japanese so I wouldn't really know).
All the dishes we had can be ordered separately as well (except the carpaccio I think?), so you don't have to have the party menu just to try certain dishes. Their variety of dishes is great and there are more things I would have liked to try, so I hope we get to go there again sometime, even though it is pricey. To be honest, what izakaya isn't pricey around here anyways?
Also, here's a photo of what I was wearing yesterday! This is the duffel coat I bought in Buffalo. Since I never took a photo of it to show people, here it is. I saw a few at P-mall with some more unique colour schemes but they were expensive and didn't have my size. >< Too bad.
To end the post, I'll show you what I got today!
Emi is awesome awesome and knows that I'm trying to obtain some more feminine habits in both my closet and routines, so she got me a make-up starter kit that she put together herself! I'm waiting for her blog post to see what advice she has to give. XD By the way, this is the only physical gift I got, haha. I got money from my aunt in the form of red pocket money (on top of the usual one), and well, my parents paid for dinner last night and lunch today and the cake...and yea. 8D (And well, Kira says her present to me is coming!)
Then, the cake I got! Chose it myself (hazelnut mocha mousse) and awkwardly, was the one to request what to write on the plate, lol. I didn't expect it to be so tacky! I thought it was going to be smaller and written with melted chocolate or something. XD; Ah well. Not the best cake I had, but not the worst either. Liked my cheesecake from last year better, but meh.
I shall end up super long post here now. Comparing this post to my post last year, this is definitely more epic and eventful. It's a good thing. X3
My usual habit is to spam on my birthday, but this year, I'm a bit slow with writing my entries, so I'll just have to deal with one entry that was posted on the actual day of (the previous scans entry) and one that is posted about 90 minutes after the date has changed (this one).
First of all, thank you to everyone who has sent in birthday wishes! I even received a few from people I have never really spoken to, but they have me on their friends list. I will be replying to PMs with a personal thank you later (except for those with privacy options on...).
Since it's a weekday today, I didn't do anything too special. Celebrations happened yesterday, and compared to last year, there was definitely more things going on. Last year, because it was really close to Chinese New Year, we had a gathering more for that reason. This year, Chinese New Year was earlier, so it was a bit different.
This post is mainly about where I had my dinner and post will be heavily about food. Very yummy looking too, so you have been warned. Also a photo of my duffel coat I bought in Buffalo, my cake and stuff!
Yesterday, I made plans with my awesome friend Emi ♥ and we had lunch together before shopping around at Pacific Mall, one of the biggest and most well-known Chinese mall in the city. (Despite that, I always say that I only go there like once a year, which is quite true. My mom doesn't like going to that mall much.) We had Pho for lunch (which wasn't too interesting to take a photo of, especially since I didn't have beef, but cow intestines (tripe, I think that part is called?)) and went shopping afterwards.
There were quite a few things I wanted to get, but obviously had to hold back due to the prices. It's so easy to be charmed by the various clothing and accessories and shoes and bags I came across, but the prices make the whole experience difficult. Including a brief trip to Market Village, another mall right beside P-mall, I ended up getting this hoodie dress, a new hat, as well as a pair of leg warmers. As I mentioned though, I won't be taking photos of these until I receive my package from YesStyle as well (which was just shipped a few hours ago).
Since P-mall has Beard Papa, I had been planning to get a chou cream, but Emi wanted to try this gelato place, so I fell into temptation and got gelato as well. Hers was Ferrero Rocher, while mine was coconut raspberry. Technically speaking if dinner wasn't going to be early, I could have managed a chou cream, but I knew it was both early and filling, so I had to give up. Ah well.
I was picked up by my family at the mall, so after parting with Emi, we headed straight to dinner. The place where I had my birthday dinner is called Fin Izakaya. It's close to Eglinton and Yonge, and it's because where it's located is still considered midtown and not downtown that I was able to try this place. Our family just never would head to downtown, especially just for food.
We were a party of 8 - my family of 4, my cousin, my grandmother (not by blood though), and a family friend and her son. This is my second time going to an izakaya in Toronto, so I'm going to mention briefly my previous experience first.
Last time (this was a while ago), because my mom and sister had to attend this line dance dinner party (not the one at the beginning of this year which I've mentioned, if there are those that remember), I was left with my dad, and we had to figure what we want to eat for. I decided I want to try out the izakaya at J-Town because at least it was close enough (compared to other izakayas). Therefore, we headed to Izakaya Ju to try it out. The photos below include motsuni (stewed pork intestines with yam cake, miso-based), yakitori (salt-flavoured, I believe that's nankotsu (soft bone), sunagimo (gizzard), and negima (chicken thigh meat with leek)), and gindara daikon (black cod and radish simmered in soy sauce-based soup). The dishes are really simple (for the most part, if I remember correctly?) and what I consider to be really traditional izakaya dishes. The atmosphere is a bit lacking though, due to simple lighting (it's not dimmed or anything due to the windows) and the place is rather small, so I wouldn't say you can get a really crowded and active atmosphere, if that makes any sense. I think the food taste good though.
Drinks wise, they had several alcohol choices, including sake and shouchuu. For mixed drinks, it's mainly chuuhai, stuff like that? Nothing fancy.
Going back to Fin Izakaya. The atmosphere is definitely much fancier and has more of a izakaya feel to it, with energetic servers calling out every time people walk in or leave the restaurant. I wouldn't say I was able to completely experience the atmosphere just because we're a party of 8, plus we ordered a party course menu, so we actually sat in a private room.
You can see the party course menu here and we went for the celebrity course one, wanting something a bit more special.
Overall, the pace of the dishes being served was very good. We never had more than two course items on our table, and there was a bit of a gap between the dishes and the nabe, so it did give us some down time. As there was 8 of us, for most dishes, we got two servings of each, which would be logical of course, so we can have our food easily without moving plates around.
You have to order the party course menu ahead of time, so once you're ready, just tell them to serve up the food. The wait time wasn't that long.
We started with 鴨サラダ or the salad with duck meat. The duck meat is obviously about medium rare and very tender, so it was great. The dressing is gomadare (sesame) and even my mom who doesn't like any of sauces/dressings except for few specific ones (for salads, only oil-based dressings - we've been using sun dried tomato and oregon or something like that since forever), seem to like the sauce, which is a good thing!
While we're finishing our salad, came 豚の角煮 or buta no kakuni, which is pork stewed/braised (I think) in this soy sauce-based soup kind of thing. (Is it pork belly meat? I don't remember what that portion is called in English.) Also very tender and tasty. You can really tell that time was spent making this.
Next came 特製炙りしめ鯖 or blowtorched shimesaba (mackerel). They actually bring in the blowtorch and do the burning in front of us! I personally love saba, so this was a wonderful dish, especially when you put the scallions and ginger on top with it. Technically speaking, you're to mix it with the soy sauce, but my cousin and my sister don't like them, so I put them on my own pieces directly instead.
Then came マグロのカルパッチョ or Tuna Carpaccio, Japanese style. Mhhhh~ It was epically awesome, especially if you eat it with the cucumbers and sprouts in the middle.
My cocktail came somewhere between these dishes, and I forgot to immediately take a photo, but yes, my drink! (It's not too focused well, due to lighting and the distance between lens and the drink. Not too big after all.) It's called Shooting Stars and is made from plum wine, cherry liq, grapefruit juice, vodka, and tonic. There are a few other choices, but I made sure to choose one that would use plum wine, or at least something that's Japanese. The cherry flavour felt a bit strong at first, but it's all good once I've gotten used to it.
Next was the awesome ザ!アンガス牛のタタキ or Beef tataki. You dip the meat in ponzu, and mhhhh, ponzu. I like ponzu. Love it, but I can't exactly buy a whole bottle to have in the house because it'll take a long time to finish it, and that's not good.
We then have 揚げ物人気3種盛り合わせ(キス天、手羽先岩塩胡椒、レンコンはさみ揚げ), or a tempura platter! There is kisuten (a type of fish known as kisu (I have no idea what's it called in English, but it's um, white meat fish?) in the middle, then renkon hasami age on the left (lotus root with minced fish meat in between), and chicken wings on the right. You eat the renkon with wasabi soy sauce, and the kisuten with the mustard mayo (or I think it's something like that). The renkon (damn you autocorrect, it's not reckon) wasn't as epic as I thought it might be, but the kisuten was really well fried and I love the mayo sauce.
海からの5点盛 came next, which is just basically a sashimi platter. The tai fish (I think?) is kind of hidden, but ahhhh, the raw scallops and shrimps are so good and fresh! I only eat scallops raw, so haha, it was great.
備長炭焼鶏串、煮込照り焼きソースで, or the chicken skewers definitely have a lot more volume than Izakaya Ju from above! The teriyaki sauce isn't too heavy, so it was pretty good!
Then came our little break because most of the dishes have been served. We have choices for the hot pot and we decided on 寄せ鍋 (yosenabe). The choices available on the menu online is a little off because what they actually offered us was a regular hot pot (which I assume is like shabu shabu), sukiyaki (we decided against it because we can make them at home and we did before), and a seafood and chicken yosenabe, which is what we got. Yosenbae usually uses soy sauce-based soup or even a miso-based, but I think this one uses katsuobushi (bonito flakes) with some soy sauce. Nice and warm and homey, great for the final dish. We chose udon as our shime, or the final um, food? to end our nabe with. No photo of that.
The dessert was 抹茶ロールケーキ or matcha/green tea roll cake. I actually don't like roll cakes very much, usually due to the cream inside, but this one was pretty good! The cream was quite light and the azuki filling helped balance the flavours out as well, so I liked it!
That ends our dinner! It took us nearly about 3 hours to finish the whole course, but it was great. Since it was a private room as well, we can just talk and not really worry about other customers (though my dad got really loud at certain points and it was kind of embarrassing XD; ). The izakaya has this points system which we ended up joining, but to be honest, I have no idea what benefits we get, LOL. I think we ended up drinking 3 bottles of house sake, one cocktail (mine) and two non-alcoholic drinks (pineapple calpis), so with the course menu at $37CAD per person, it was quite the bill, but mhhh, tasty food and fancy at that, you can't really complain! The servers were really nice as well, though depending on who you're talking to, it might not be so easy to communicate in English (is what my family friend said, because they arrived before us, and once I arrived, all communications were done by me in Japanese so I wouldn't really know).
All the dishes we had can be ordered separately as well (except the carpaccio I think?), so you don't have to have the party menu just to try certain dishes. Their variety of dishes is great and there are more things I would have liked to try, so I hope we get to go there again sometime, even though it is pricey. To be honest, what izakaya isn't pricey around here anyways?
Also, here's a photo of what I was wearing yesterday! This is the duffel coat I bought in Buffalo. Since I never took a photo of it to show people, here it is. I saw a few at P-mall with some more unique colour schemes but they were expensive and didn't have my size. >< Too bad.
To end the post, I'll show you what I got today!
Emi is awesome awesome and knows that I'm trying to obtain some more feminine habits in both my closet and routines, so she got me a make-up starter kit that she put together herself! I'm waiting for her blog post to see what advice she has to give. XD By the way, this is the only physical gift I got, haha. I got money from my aunt in the form of red pocket money (on top of the usual one), and well, my parents paid for dinner last night and lunch today and the cake...and yea. 8D (And well, Kira says her present to me is coming!)
Then, the cake I got! Chose it myself (hazelnut mocha mousse) and awkwardly, was the one to request what to write on the plate, lol. I didn't expect it to be so tacky! I thought it was going to be smaller and written with melted chocolate or something. XD; Ah well. Not the best cake I had, but not the worst either. Liked my cheesecake from last year better, but meh.
I shall end up super long post here now. Comparing this post to my post last year, this is definitely more epic and eventful. It's a good thing. X3