Extra: Tokyo Grill (0.5 km)

Yeah that's right: not one but two bonus entries this week! Isn't it amazing? Isn't it almost more excitement than you can bear? Yeah, me too.

I had been originally planning to include Tokyo Grill on the regular Sushipalooza roster, but on closer inspection it turned out not to be a sushi restaurant. They do have a very small selection of sushi on the menu, but the main focus is on teriyaki and donburi and whatnot. The odd thing is I could swear it used to be a sushi restaurant, when I went there like 10 years ago. Either they've rejigged the menu, or my memory's not worth much. The smart money is on "b".

But I wasn't about to let that stop me from visiting and trying out some non-sushi Japanese food. And by posting about it here, I can write off the meal as a business expense on my income tax, right? Remind me to ask my accountant about that.

I decided to get the katsu don, a bowl of rice topped with vegetables, egg, and a breaded fried pork cutlet. Kind of similar to Korean bibimbap (a favourite winter dish of mine), only minus the sizzling bowl. Good stuff.

I supplemented my meal with an order of agedashi tofu. To those who say they don't like tofu, I say: try it deep fried. I liked this better than the tempura tofu I got at Kokyo back in week 2. Less... tofuey.

My favourite thing about Tokyo Grill: they had Christmas decorations up. In July. I can dig that. Why take them down in the first place when you're just going to have to put them back up in 11 months, right?

Extra: Sushi Plaza (0.4 km)

Well, I'm not going to be going here, obviously. Sushi Plaza would've been next week's Sushipalooza stop... if it hadn't gone out of business, like, a year and a half ago.

I do have fond memories of this place from my university days, not as a sushi restaurant but as a gritty burger joint that was open until 4am and served great french fries. A few years ago the owner retired (or got shot, or indicted, who knows?) and Sushi Plaza took over the space. Apparently sushi was not as popular with the cabbies and prostitutes as burgers were; when I took the picture above, the eviction notice on the door mentioned something like $15,000 in rent arrears. Ouch.

Last time I was by, the "For Lease" signs were gone, and a liquor licence application notice was up. The new place is apparently going to be called Guu Izakaya. So still Japanese, but not sushi. Will it fare better than Sushi Plaza? I'll check it out after it opens and report back! Unless I forget, which I almost certainly will.

Week 11: Sushi Garden (0.4 km)

Sushi Garden is located just off Yonge on Wellesley. Its 50-foot frontage in eye-catching reflective glass might lead you to believe it's a pretty big place... but it's only about 10 feet deep.

I was in a bento mood again, and Sushi Garden obliged me by having about a dozen different bento combinations on the menu. I went with the D1, which for the princely sum of $10 came fully loaded with teriyaki, gyoza, a couple pieces of breaded calamari, spicy salmon rolls, and a dollop of wakame seaweed salad. I like wakame, but when you order it as a separate side you always get a freaking ton of it. So this worked out quite nicely, just enough to enjoy.

The bento also came with the usual green salad (better-than-average dressing) and miso soup (non-dehydrated-looking tofu and seaweed were a nice touch, but the broth was a touch bland).

I ordered beef teriyaki, then after the server left I thought "darn, I wish I ordered chicken instead, I kind of feel like chicken now that I think about it". But I didn't bother trying to change my order. And what did they bring me? Chicken teriyaki! Indisputable conclusion: the servers at Sushi Garden are freaking psychic!

And of course I can never resist exploring the special maki menu. I got an imaginatively-named "Shrimp Crab & Cucumber Roll". Guess what was in it? There was one slight surprise: the cucumber was on the outside.

Compared to Daio, Sushi Garden was pretty easy on the wallet. And check this out: $3 domestic and $4 "Japanese" beers. So if you're ever looking for a $3 beer in a place with better ambience than Mr. Tasty Burger, here's another option for you.

I will just close by saying this: I eat slow. After I ordered, somebody else came in, sat down, ordered, ate, paid, left, then another person came in and did the same thing, and also got out of there a good 10 minutes before I did. Of course they didn't screw around taking pictures of their food...

Week 10: Sushi on the Run - College Park (0.4 km)

Sushi on the Run is not a restaurant. There's no sushi chef on premises, and they don't (so far as I know) serve any hot food. It's just a little shop equipped with a cooler full of pre-made items. They have a number of locations (er, the number might be two); this one is in the passage connecting College Park to the subway station, across from the Cinnabon. Fine dining this ain't.

I think Sushi on the Run mostly caters to the office drones at lunch time; by dinner time all their sushi is "buy one get one free", which makes it a pretty economical meal.

I got myself a "Golden Dragon", with fake crab salad or something on the inside and slices of salmon on the outside. Given that this was end-of-day food court sushi, I wasn't surprised to find that some of the salmon was a little discoloured and fishy-smelling. Most of it was OK, but I tossed a couple of pieces.

My "free" box contained 4 pieces each of California roll and BBQ eel nigiri. Both were serviceable but unspectacular.

I also got a box of gyoza. Nobody likes cold gyoza, so I warmed them up in the microwave, which worked out slightly better than you might expect. They were labelled as "veg.", but they certainly appeared to contain meat. If I were a vegetarian I might be annoyed, but I actually saw it as a bonus.

I'm sure Sushi on the Run must be seeing some stiff lunch competition from Sushi Shop, which offers a much wider variety (and better quality, based on my unscientific survey) in about the same price range. But if you're looking for sushi at dinner time, and want it fast, and want it cheap, Sushi on the Run's BOGO deal is pretty hard to beat.

Week 9: Daio Sushi (0.4 km)

Man, things are pretty tight these past few weeks... I actually thought I wasn't going to hit Daio until Week 11, until I mapped out a shorter walking route that shaved about 30 metres off the distance, vaulting it up to this week. Oh, the drama!

Yes, of course I'm a nerd.

Anyway, I remember going to Daio shortly after it first opened, years ago. I'm not sure that I've been back since. Not that I had anything against it, just never got around to it.

Daio joins Solo Sushi Bekkan as one of the more formal (and pricey) sushi joints in the Yonge-Carlton Sushi Axis. The inside is all mood lighting and paper-walled booths, but since I finally hit a patio-equipped restaurant on a day when the weather wasn't god-awful, outside seemed like the place to be.

I started off my meal by trying something new: Chowanmushi. It's a kind of steamed custard deal filled with bits of seafood. It was quite good, a welcome change from the usual tempura veggie appetizers (as much as I like tempura).

For my entree, I went with the Sushi Combo B. Being the sushi expert that I am, I could identify maybe 6 or 7 of the 10 items. Could that actually be real crab meat? At the very least, it's high quality fake crab meat. I don't really care which; it was good. Nice generous portions of all the fish too.

The waitress said they had very good teriyaki sauce, and my dining companion concurred. The teriyaki chicken came on a sizzling iron dish, combining the flavour of fine Japanese dining with the pizazz of Kelsey's fajitas. Rad.

With this week's entry, we are now officially more than half way through Sushipalooza '09. Only 8 more weeks 'til Labour day! Will I ever make it to a place I couldn't hit with a California roll hurled from my balcony? Time will tell!

Week 8: Daily Sushi (0.4 km)

Daily Sushi is another relatively established contender in the ever-growing lineup of sushi places along the Yonge Street Strip. I think I remember it being there at least 10 years ago. Maybe. It's location right next to the Carlton Cinema makes it perfect for dinner-and-movie outings. Of course, if you live right around the corner and have an hour to kill between dinner and movie, you can run home and blog about your dinner first. But that would be way lame.

Like much of its Yonge Street competition, Daily Sushi sports a casual atmosphere and a ridiculously varied menu. Raw fish not your bag? They've got all sorts of meals based on grilled meat and/or noodles. "Rare beef sushi"? Check. Not one but two kinds of fried calamari appetizers? Check. Plenty to choose from.

But you can't eat it all, so I picked a couple of the more interesting maki varieties, and just one of the fried calamari variants ("Tempura Squid"). Oh, and a really salty miso soup and some surprise complimentary edamame.

The "Daily Sushi Roll" (which seems to be called the "Katsu Roll" in the take-out menu, for some reason) consists of BBQ eel, cucumber, and avocado. You had me at BBQ eel. (Oddly, they also have a "BBQ eel roll", which appears to be the same thing, minus the avocado). How can you top that? How about with a "Fresh Mango Salmon Roll", with mango and crab stick, topped with raw salmon? Pretty good for something without any deep fried ingredients.

My dining companions also had some sort of teriyaki-based bento box, some sashimi, and a grilled beef thing of some sort. I didn't specifically solicit opinions on them, but I didn't see anybody vomiting outside the restaurant so I guess it must've been OK.

Well if you'll pardon me, I have to run back out to catch my movie. Hey, there's a Japanese film playing, maybe I should make it a theme night...

Week 7: Sushi Shop (0.4 km)

Better late than never, I now present this (past) week's vacation-delayed instalment of Sushipalooza!

Apparently Sushi Shop is a fairly major chain in Montreal. Earlier this year they opened their first Toronto location at Carlton and Yonge. It has a distinctly fast-food vibe; they do have a small dining room but I don't think they offer table service. They also don't have a patio, and since it's a lovely mid-May afternoon (in early July), I did the only sane thing: got my meal to go and ate it on my balcony.

Sushi Shop's menu consists almost entirely of maki, with a few standard varieties of nigiri / sashimi. Notably absent are bento boxes, teriyaki, and noodle-based dishes. If ordering off the menu is too much time and effort, you can grab one of their pre-made "express combos" from the cooler. So I did.

The $10 Combo G included salmon and shrimp nigiri, 2 each of Boston, Dynamite, and Spicy Salmon Crunch rolls, and what the menu referred to as "chef's choice" of small maki. Today the chef chose to include some slightly wilted avocado rolls.

My favourite of the bunch was the Boston Roll, with crab stick, shrimp, and cucumber. The Dynamite (tempura shrimp, avocado, cucumber) and Spicy Salmon Crunch were also quite nice.

Since the combo didn't come with the usual miso soup and green salad, I opted to augment it with a wakame seaweed salad. I like seaweed salad, and this one was perfectly good, but I could've done with about half the portion I was given. It's more than enough for sharing.

Sushi Shop is clearly taking aim at the take-out lunch market, and their quality and selection certainly seems to be a step up from the food court. It'd be a good place for a quick casual bite, or to pick up supplies for a summer sushi picnic. If you're looking for a hot sit-down meal, you might want to try one of the other kajillion sushi restaurants in the neighbourhood.