It’s been a while since I’ve been to Tairyou Ichiba so I had forgotten how amazing everything there was! Luckily, we had the perfect opportunity to go when a few family friends were visiting.
Tairyou Ichiba is located along Kingsway and you won’t miss it because they have the most iconic wooden doors on the outside.
Since our family friends were visiting from out of town, we decided to order a bit of everything so they could see what Japanese cuisine in Vancouver was about.
Tairyou Ichiba sashimi
To start off we got a variety of sashimi (red tuna, tuna, squid, snapper, salmon). Each piece was as fresh as can be and you could tell that they probably didn’t keep them frozen.
Octopus carpaccio
Brother Deer isn’t a fan of fish, so we decided to get an octopus carpaccio so he could have some fresh seafood too. The octopus was sliced thin and had a ponzu vinaigrette on top. We liked that it came with a light salad underneath so we could have some greens with it too.
BBQ squid
As if having octopus wasn’t enough, we also ordered the bbq squid legs. These are one of Mother Deer’s favorites so we usually don’t go to a Japanese place without ordering them. I wish I could say these were as good as the octopus but they weren’t. They were rubbery and barely even hot. It was as though they were cooked previously and then they just microwaved it before serving it to us. Overall, we were all pretty disappointed with this dish.
The squid rings and takoyaki on the other-hand, were done much better and a lot more enjoyable of a dining experience.
Oyster motoyaki
Our family friends had never had oyster motoyaki before so we ordered some for them to try. They usually don’t serve baked oysters in their shell anymore in Vancouver so instead, they were baked in a glass dish. The oysters were topped with a mixture of mayo and cheese which made them rich and creamy.
We couldn’t eat at a Japanese restaurant without ordering some rolls so we decided to order a few of the “must haves” in Vancouver.
Shrimp aburi roll
We started off with a shrimp aburi roll. Unlike most restaurants, Tairyou Ichiba toasts their aburi rolls table side so you can watch them torch your rolls! It’s actually pretty cool to watch if you’ve never seen this before.
Although it was cool to watch them torch the sushi, the roll wasn’t as impressive because the shrimp got lost between all the rich flavors of the mayo and slabs of rice. I’d have aburi from here again but maybe not the shrimp one next time.
Sushi rolls
We couldn’t leave without letting them try out the BC roll, chopped scallop roll and dynamite roll. Others might disagree but these are the rolls I think of when it comes to having sushi in Vancouver. I personally don’t particularly like BC roll, but it is one that you can’t find anywhere else in the world!
Each roll was packed full of ingredients and while they aren’t rolled as big as what you would find at Sushi garden, they were much better in quality and experience!
Nabeyaki
By the time we had all this food, we still weren’t feeling too full so we decided to order a nabeyaki udon and unagi don. The nabeyaki udon was pretty standard. It came with chicken, dashi broth and a piece of shrimp tempura. The udon noodles still had a bite to it which was just the way I like it and the chicken was still juicy. We would have liked for the shrimp tempura to be on the side instead of being in the soup but it was a pretty good dish.
Unagi Don
We ordered this unagi don thinking it would come with pieces of regular unagi on top but it came to us deep fried instead. We thought they should have mentioned this on the menu because it’s a pretty important thing to leave out and we would have liked the usual preparation better. Since there wasn’t a lot of sauce on the unagi or rice, the dish ended up being pretty dry and not very satisfying. We could have done without this dish for sure.
Overall, I would say our visit this time around was a bit hit and miss depending on what we decided to order. I think next time I’m going to stick with the raw preparation of items because those seemed to be more of a hit.