Lunch at Broadway Station Sushi

This week my friend Barb was in town, and she and I and another friend got together for lunch on Tuesday. The consensus was that sushi was in order (all of us being sushi fans) and our friend, who lives and works near Broadway and Commercial in Vancouver, suggested Broadway Station Sushi (1638 E. Broadway), where she'd had a good experience before.

We met at 1pm and the place was quite busy. But we had hit the tail end of the lunch rush so the place emptied out quite quickly. It took us a while to order because we were all chatty as we hadn't seen each other in about a month. Eventually we decided.

I had two rolls, the Jumbo Dynamite and the Salmon & Avocado. Barb ordered the Spider Roll and the Sunshine Roll. Our friend ordered the Spicy Combo. This restaurant makes sushi with brown rice if you request it, and both of my friends did, but I stuck with regular white rice.

My combo.

Spicy combo with brown rice.

Spider roll - excellent. I tried it and loved it.

Sunshine roll. I believe it had smoked salmon in it and I think the topping was a seaweed thingy. It was also very good.

Great meal! I now have another Vancouver sushi place to add to my list to return to!

Some Vancouver Sushi

During my trip to the coast in March, which was 5 days long, I didn't get any sushi. None. It was very disappointing indeed. During this most recent trip last week, I made sure I got some sushi in. Sushi is ridiculously cheap and easy to come by at the coast. It's everywhere and it's good and it's very economical. Here in this one horse town, I can get a sushi roll at LOGS for about $7 - $8. At the specialty grocery stores at the coast, like T&T Supermarket, which is Chinese, H Mart, which is Korean, and Fujiya, which is Japanese, there is excellent supermarket sushi (and bento boxes and other roll-ish foods) in copious amounts and for super cheap prices. It's like heaven. Seriously.

The first sushi I had was at a place in Gastown called Momo Sushi. I had just had a busy afternoon of shopping and visiting with blog pal Scout of Harper Valley, and after we parted I had some time to kill before my ride went to take me back to Shihtzustaff's place, where I was staying. So, I saw this Momo place along Water Street and looked at their menu. To my shock, I could get a duo of sushi rolls - Dynamite and California - for $7.25! I was in! I got a seat, ordered, and was soon in sushi bliss.

It was absolutely wonderful sushi, and beautifully presented. I couldn't believe how much sushi I got for $7.25! I was blown away when the waitress brought me my board full of sushi.

I highly recommend this place if you're in the Gastown area and in need of a sushi fix!

I used to shop at T&T Supermarket when I lived in Coquitlam when I was in culinary school and it was always such a cool experience. It's like no other grocery store I've been in. There are so many live fish available for purchase that you practically feel like you're at the Vancouver aquarium (no, you don't eat the fish at the Vancouver Aquarium, but you get what I'm saying). T&T has pretty good grocery store sushi, so I got myself a spicy shrimp roll as I was in the store looking for some cooking ingredients I can't find here. This was just OK; not terribly fresh, but tasty enough and it was good enough considering it cost like $4.


Fujiya is where I hit the jackpot with awesome grocery store sushi. In fact, I also got a bento box for good measure. This is a spider roll, made with deep fried soft shell crab. With an exotic ingredient like that, I was super stoked about the pricetag:


$4.95! That is unheard of in these parts! And it was really tasty and fresh, and the crab had a bit of a kick to it in the batter. Awesome!

I also got a bento box for frakking $5!


This was a bit odd, I have to say. The shrimp were great, the rice was great, the green sesame salady thing (top left) was great, but the potato salad (bottom right) was brutal and contained frozen peas & carrots (ew!) and the other seafood items were weird. They included two fake scallops. I have never heard of a fake scallop, but it was much like fake crab meat only scallop-shaped and not pink. There was one deep fried shrimp, which was fine, and then there was a small piece of other fish I couldn't identify. This was accompanied by tartar sauce. Next time, I'd go for something else because this was nothing to write home about and the combinations were really strange.

Believe it or not, that was all the sushi I had. I could have had more, but there are so many foodie options down there it's just too much!

I Ate Sashimi!

Last weekend's trip to Calgary was a very awesome experience, and I have a zillion stories to tell but one I thought might be interesting for my readership here was a sushi restaurant I visited with my one of my BFFs, J.

J loves sushi and she knows I love sushi, so she took me off to a place whose name I cannot remember, though it began with a K, on McLeod Trail. What's fascinating about it is that this was one of those sushi restaurants that has the little boats on a moving waterway carrying colour-coded plates of food around the bar, and you just pick off what you want as it comes around. I have heard of these places in Vancouver, but never been to one, so this was exciting for me.

Unfortunately the frenetic pace of the place, the yelling of sushi chefs, and the multiple birthdays that necessitated the staff doing a Happy Birthday routine several times during our time there, didn't make the place somewhere conducive to having a good chat. In fact, the high stimulation environment really bothered me to the point of almost not being able to function. But it was fun, and when we were done there, we repaired to a Tim Horton's so we could actually have a good chat.

The food was good. We started off with some tempura and J had some miso soup. We ordered several rolls as we watched plates go by us on the boats. Thankfully, we were provided with a picture menu so we had an idea of what was floating by us.

J ordered some salmon sashimi, I got some interesting octopus rolls and some calamari. The calamari was disappointing and overly greasy, as was, I have to say, the tempura. The octopus was good. We had a variety of other rolls, too, that were very good.

You'd think the plates were just whizzing by when you look at this photo. They were not. I just have a shitty camera.

The calamari. The sauce it came with was spicy, so I skipped it.

This is the octopus roll.

This is the salmon sashimi, and I really did enjoy it. It was my first ever foray into sashimi! It was served on a bed of shredded daikon radish.

And this was my most daring choice of the night, a raw scallop roll with some...stuff on it. Not sure what the stuff was, but it was delicious!

This was a very cool experience, and I'd definitely like to go to one of these places again, especially as there were some very interesting menu items that I'd never seen before. I will say, however, something did upset my stomach that night; I'm not sure what it was, but I was quite uncomfortable for a while. But it was not enough to put me off experimenting with sushi and sashimi again.

Dinner at Drift

Rossland has a fantastic Asian tapas place called Drift, which I finally got a chance to try when my SIL chose to have her birthday dinner there at the end of December. This place is WAY out of my price range (my dinner cost me $40) but it was so worth it because it was absolutely outstanding. Here are some photos from around the table, where we shared a variety of dishes.

This is a mixed veggie tempura - fabulicious.

Seared tuna.

A bowl of pho, complete with tempura veggies - outstanding.

I am still thinking about this sushi roll - a tempura salmon roll with cream cheese and leek that was deep fried...ORGASMIC.

Fish tacos made with halibut.

Edamame.

Beef tenderloin skewers with blue cheese butter.

Tofu something.

Spicy ginger beef rice bowl.

Chopsticks Birthday Dinner

So, it's my birthday on Friday, but due to scheduling conflicts within my family, we had my birthday dinner last night. I chose Chopsticks in Castlegar, which is seriously the best Chinese food & sushi around these parts. I also went there last year.

We had a huge feast of both sushi & Chinese food and it was amazing! Here are the highlights.

I started off with a nice girly drink - a pina colada. Yum!

We then had a starter of Wor Won-Ton. It's the best I've ever had.

The non-sushi eaters had some veggie tempura.
This is the Caterpillar Roll, which is made with BBQ Eel, avocado, and a really good BBQ sauce. It's my favourite and it is sooooo good. Not to mention, the presentation is awesome.
We also had the Dynamite Roll, which is my other favourite. Totally excellent.
Then, onto the Chinese food: Lemon Chicken, Ginger Beef, & Chicken & Mushroom Chow Mein. It was all hot, fresh, and delicious.

There were very few leftovers, I can tell you that! And the best part was yet to come: at home, we had a Dairy Queen ice cream cake - Tin Roof Sunday Blizzard-flavour and it was da bomb!
It was an excellent time with my family and I am truly blessed to have them in my life! On my real birthday, I get to go camping! I'm totally stoked about that!