Downtown Vancouver. A little happy hour on the hotel balcony.
"Even revolutionaries like chocolate chip cookies."
(Actually, one was oatmeal raisin, Peter's favorite, so I guess that makes me the revolutionary.)
Dinner reservation was a ways out so happy hour was extended for one more drink before we started walking towards the water.
Miku. Glad we booked a table because the line was insane. On a Wednesday night, hour-long wait for the bar alone.
The restaurant specializes in aburi-style: flame-searing foods over a Japanese hardwood grill so you get the dual effects of the torch and the smoke. The scallop nigiri at Kashiba had been prepared this way, as suggested by the server, and it was not good. But the guys at Miku have it DOWN.
Aburi beef carpaccio: sterling silver AAA short rib, 64° egg, pickled wasabi, horseradish crème fraîche, jalapeño ponzu, and a delicious little salad. You eat it by spreading everything around and rolling up the salad in the beef using chopsticks. So delicious, we immediately began discussing how to acquire a commercial-grade meat slicer when we get back.
Fantastic little sashimi sampler. From left to right: salmon with ikura (red caviar) and citrus anchovy salsa, scallop with spicy jumbo prawn and cod roe aioli, bigeye tuna with tuna tartare and pickled wasabi masatake (caramelized onion and soy) sauce, and hamachi with and avocado and ikura "ceviche".
Prawn cocktail with a gingery cocktail sauce, for old school romance, not adventure.
Aburi-style unagi is great- I normally find bbq eel sauce so cloying. Here it was caramelized and actually tasted like a barbecue.
Oshizushi- pressed sushi - so good we ended up ordering every kind.
Pressed torched salmon.
Bedroom slips of albacore belly with more of that wonderful masatake sauce.
Sake in stems again- not as small as Kashiba's; I liked these less. They were the 9oz Schott Zwiesel Tritan crystal glass white wine stems. Too small to be useful for wine, too big to be useful for anything else.
Red Wave roll- we ordered it because it was supposed to have uni in it, but uni wasn't available, so we basically ended up with a California roll wrapped with tuna. But... Masatake sauce!
Pressed mackerel sushi with miso.
Amberjack. Both Miku and Kashiba do the traditional Japanese thing of seasoning the rice with wasabi, which you can see glowing through the fish. I prefer it this way and it's the only way I've seen it done in Japan.
Pressed prawn with ume sauce and lime zest. A million times more delicious than it had any reason to be.
Not normally dessert eaters, but we got talked into ordering the green tea opera, which apparently takes nine years to make or something. It was awesome.
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