Restaurant Review: Yua Bistro

This week’s blog is a restaurant review. M., Dragon-kun, and I went to a relatively new Japanese restaurant near Chinatown call Yua Bristro.

The atmosphere of the restaurant is warm, and inviting, although the stained glass lamps were more reminiscent of a pizzeria than of an Asian restaurant.

If you like maki (sushi rolls) this might be an okay restaurant. It is not a traditional Japanese restaurant, it has a number of interesting options on the menu, such as Yuzu Mango Roll (cucumber avocado, cream cheese, topped with mango, yuzu sauce) $13. But it also has a list of traditional fare.

We did not try any of the non-traditional things on the menu.

For starters we had gomae, ika sansai, and agedashi tofu.

Besides the greens of the gomae swimming in the sauce these dishes were good. The ika sansai was my favourite.

For drinks we ordered yuzu sparkling water (which the server kept reading back as sparkling wine), and sake… out of a list of 12 sake, they only had the house sake on offer (server never gave an explanation as to why they only had one kind of sake).

For our main dish we order ikura, California rolls, uni, and toro.

The presentation was good and the front of house was clean.

We let Dragon-kun try some of the sake… but I don’t think he is much of a drinker.

Unfortunately, there were a number of things that were subpar about this pricey restaurant.

As mentioned above, they only had one of the twelve sake on offer.

One of the names of the dishes, Monkey brain (deep fried avocado stuffed with spicy tuna, crab meat, spicy mayo, unagi sauce), was a racial stereotype of Asian cuisine (perhaps done in jest but tacky all the same).

The service was lacking: the waitress took our order, and came back several times with questions, such as, what size of sake did we want? (We had mentioned the size when we ordered). Did we want the full order of uni or the half order? Then she came back to inform us that they only had one type of sake on the menu. Once the meal was served the waitress never came to check on what we thought of the food.

The spray used to clean the tables had some kind of chemical that made one’s throat burn. (Two tables were cleaned while we ate, one next to us and one slightly further away, both times the fumes from the spray were irritating).

Finally, and this is a big one. The uni which was the most expensive item that we ordered had gone off. All I can say to describe the taste and smell is to compare it to a toilet after someone has been in it for a while. How the chef, who should check the freshness of their ingredients, did not smell that the uni was off is beyond me?!

The negatives far outweigh the positives for this restaurant. Therefore, kotukotsulife is giving Yua Bistro a 1 out of 5.