Yes, I’m doing food reviews
Sometimes I go out to eat at new restaurants, and reviewing those places seemed like a good idea to write reviews. All of the restaurants will be within or nearby Toronto, Ontario (Canada) with maybe some rare exceptions.
To kick off this series of restaurant reviews, I’ll be starting with a place called Shunoko. All restaurant reviews will follow this format: brief introduction to the place, food and price review, and final thoughts. Unless the interior/atmosphere of the restaurant is outstanding in a good or bad way, I won’t discuss about that because my primary focus when going to a restaurant is to eat. My descriptions of food won’t be super eloquent, I’m not good at that and really I just focus on ‘is the food good or not’ with some simple descriptions. Don’t expect poetry and especially not numeric ratings because there’s no objective way to generate them.
Your picture quality is bad
First, I take these pictures with a phone that doesn’t have a great camera, so no DSLR or pro photography skills. Second, I have to compress these images otherwise each picture is nearly 3 MB big and that’s something I can’t accept. After compression, each image is about 300-400 kB, which is much more reasonable. Third, lighting greatly impacts image quality. The worse/blurrier the picture looks, chances are that the restaurant’s lighting was very dim. Of course, I’m not good with taking photos so it is likely my fault too.
Introduction
If you’ve been to most non-high end sushi places in North America, you’ve basically tried them all. They all taste roughly the same with the same ubiquitous rolls like California, Dynamite, and Rainbow. There’s salmon and fake tuna everywhere and the rice is mediocre at best. You can go to an AYCE and the taste is comparable to a sushi place that serves normal dishes. Scattered amongst these very generic sushi restaurants are places that target a different audience, people that are willing to pay more for less quantity and better quality instead. Shunoko is a sushi restaurant located by St. Clair and Dufferin which falls under the second category. It’s a rather popular place; the staff imposed a 1 hour dining time limit and by the time I was eating, all the tables were full.
Food
I ordered 3 items: a single nigiri sushi of tuna belly and 2 maki sets; ‘Butter on Fire’ and ‘After Flood’. The restaurant’s website shows their full dine-in menu, take a look for more. Shunoko also notably offers an omakase course for those interested.
Butter on Fire ($17)
This maki set contains shrimp tempura, avocado, cucumber, and blowtorched salmon. Because all the sushi is created in an open area, you can hear the chefs using blowtorches. The dish had some butter melted with the torched salmon and was sprinkled with some rosemary. I am sensitive to the taste and smell of butter, but its presence wasn’t very strong here which is a good thing. The maki tasted great, the avocado and cucumber give the familiar taste that you’d find in any cheaper sushi place’s makis, while the shrimp tempura gives some meaty taste and the torched salmon with butter gives a slightly creamy and warm taste. The rosemary, with some soy sauce and wasabi, helps to keep the butter and salmon taste restrained. Overall, I liked this dish. It delivers good taste without overrelying on sauces or spices to mask the taste of salmon and the ingredients feel fresh.
After Flood ($22)
Right away, I preferred this maki over the salmon one. This one had a few types of fish as sashimi slices on top of each roll so you get to try a few fish. The roll contains eggs, avocado, cucumber, shiitake (mushrooms), and shiso (a vegetable). Because there is no butter and torched salmon, the maki tastes way cleaner and not buttery. The egg adds a sweetness that goes very well with the shiitake, and personally I didn’t get any tastes from the shiso. The slight sweetness combines nicely with the avocado and cucumbers to form a slightly sweet, chewy, and crunchy mixture that pairs smoothly with the sashimi slices. The fish doesn’t smell or taste fishy, and it feels fresh; it definitely doesn’t look like it came out of a freezer. Overall, delicious maki.
Chutoro/B.F Tuna Medium Belly ($10.5)
That’s right, this single piece of sushi cost $10.5, that’s about a quarter of an AYCE buffet dinner entry cost. The nice thing about paying a steep price for tuna like this is that you immediately get the feeling that this isn’t just some typical tuna you see anywhere. This tuna was really good. None of the signature fake tuna taste is here, this one has a much milder fish taste and it melts in the mouth. This one wasn’t even the softest tuna nigiri Shunoko offers, there’s one that is literally described as ‘melts like butter’ and I can only imagine what it would be like. The tuna was so soft that I regrettably ate it too fast to truly savour it. In conclusion, it tastes a lot better. It is absolutely different from typical fake tuna found everywhere, and I have no idea what genuine tuna tastes like because I’ve never tried it. But I can say that this ’tuna’, if real, is an incredible upgrade over cheaper ones. Was it worth it in terms of quantity? Absolutely not. In taste? Arguably yes.
Price ($49.5)
So as you can see, the prices are expensive. Even more, I felt hungry again in about 3 hours after eating. So clearly this type of sushi should be avoided if you can’t afford high-end restaurants. It definitely hurts the wallet, since for $20 less you can go to an AYCE buffet and eat nearly 3 times as much food. However, that’s just how luxury products of any market work, and Shunoko in my opinion sits before the wall of diminishing returns.
Final thoughts
I enjoyed eating at Shunoko. The place is, without a doubt, a unique sushi restaurant amongst the countless mediocre ones littered throughout Toronto. Shunoko actually tastes different and is good; if you’re tired of going to sushi restaurants because they all taste generic or the same as each other (notably AYCEs), I would recommend Shunoko because it offers a refreshing meal. The ingredients are more fresh and the fish isn’t freezed, omakase is offered, and overall the price increase can be justified due to these improvements. As long as you can accept the higher price tags and a less full stomach, Shunoko is a sushi restaurant I would keep on a list of ‘actually good sushi restaurants in Toronto’.