Love for the Locals: Japango!

This past week has been crazy, so I will be publishing a couple more posts, but I'm finishing this one just before I need to make a quick lunch, and dash off to my afternoon class! 

Over the Thanksgiving break, P paid me a visit in London, and we took a short trip to Toronto. While we were there, just like he really wanted ramen...

This was the ramen and salmon rice combination from Santouka (91 Dundas Street East, Toronto ON). It's a very small, and evidently popular ramen shop in downtown Toronto that actually belongs to a chain in Japan. According to P, there are only 2 locations in Canada - Vancouver and Toronto. I opted for the "Miso Ramen". With a Miso soup base, it had ramen noodles, naruto (spirally fish cake), bamboo shoots, pork belly, kikurage ("jelly/cloud ear" fungus - this does not come from ears :P), topped off with green onion. The salmon rice was very simple - a bed of sushi rice topped with some shavings of nori (seaweed), a helping of cooked salmon, and interestingly enough, some alfalfa sprouts. The other side dish was half of a boiled egg which was stewed in a soup base (it was actually so enticing that I ate it, which happens rarely with me and boiled eggs) and some umeboshi (pickled plum).

and Korean BBQ...

Our Korean BBQ experience in Toronto was at Korean Grill House (214 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON). At a very reasonable price of $16.95 per person (as opposed to the ridiculous price at Edmonton's Ginseng of about $30 - although, you do get a lot more variety including bacon, and you could get a segregated room which is good for parties), you could have pork, beef, chicken, kalbi (beef short ribs), ox tongue, ox liver, squid, white fish fillet, squid, and salmon belly. This all came with unlimited side dishes including bean sprouts, spicy bean sprouts (which P and I agreed didn't have much flavour), tofu, garlic potatoes, kimchi, short grain rice, and beef broth. For an additional $3, you could get unlimited vegetables including lettuce, onion, cucumber, mushrooms, and...pineapple. For the price, it was actually quite decent, and it was nice that the grill was embedded in a deep pit between us, so that the oils from cooking didn't splatter all over us during dinner. 

My first plate of Korean BBQ that night - kalbi (beef short ribs), pork sausage, kimchi, tofu, potatoes, and beansprouts. I had a total of 3 dishes of kimchi, 4 dishes of beansprouts, and 1 1/2 dishes of potatoes all to myself :) *insert feeling of accomplishment*

I really wanted buns from a Chinese bakery...

In London, there isn't any Chinese bakery. They only have a baked goods section in the 2 Asian supermarkets that exist, but they're delivered from somewhere else (possibly T&T in Toronto :/), so I kind of went a bit overboard. Recommended by Charles, we went to a bakery in Toronto's Chinatown called Ding Dong Pastries (321 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON), and came back with 1 milk tart with flaky crust, 1 egg tart with flaky crust, 2 egg tarts with pastry crust, 2 pineapple buns, 1 pineapple bun with red bean paste filling, 1 custard bun, 1 bun we don't remember getting that tasted like guava, 1 taro paste bun, 1 BBQ pork bun, 2 steamed pork and vegetable buns, 1 chicken bun, 1 beef curry bun, and 1 pork floss bun. This all came to a total of slightly over $8. It was beautiful QQ...We grabbed them on the way to dinner on our last day in Toronto, and ate some after arriving back at my suite.

As you can see, the buns didn't survive that well on the train ride, but they were still very delicious :D Here, we have 1 milk tart with flaky crust, 1 egg tart with flaky crust, 1 pineapple bun, 1 pineapple bun with red bean paste filling, 1 chicken bun, and 1 BBQ pork bun, in addition to the 2 steamed pork and vegetable buns that we ate then.

And one sushi dinner. Why is food so good in Toronto? :(

With the recommendation by P's friend, Charles, we grabbed an earlier dinner at Japango just before catching the train back to London. Japango (122 Elizabeth Street, Toronto, ON) is one of those little hole-in-the-wall places that I love so much. It's hidden around a corner and sandwiched between a few of the many other restaurants stuffed into downtown Toronto. Run by an entirely Japanese staff, they really knew what they were doing. The tiny place, about 18 seats take up half of the shop, with the other half devoted to the sushi preparation area. Japango is so narrow that they don't really have a sushi bar!

Price-wise, it was probably slightly below average which made the meal very reasonable given the amazing quality of our food. P even mentioned that it was probably the best Japanese meal he had in Canada. You would have to dine there to really experience it yourself, but it was so delicious. Even down to the soy sauce and wasabi, it was delicious. Wasabi is supposed to be edible on its own with a slight sweetness, a nice horseradish-like kick, and a smooth melt-in-your-mouth texture. The food was so lovely in its presentation that I asked P to take all of the photos for this post, feeling that the usual captures from the built-in camera of my year old Samsung Galaxy SII really didn't do them justice.

Japango! Such a small place tucked away in the abyss of downtown Toronto, but very much worth the visit!

Here, we have the "Spicy Tuna" and "Salmon and Green Onion" Maki. Both, in a way, are staples for P and I. P usually opts for "Negi Toro", which is essentially green onions and tuna. Simple, but very tasty! Japango didn't have "Negi Toro", but it was very similar, just with salmon in place of the tuna. 

The quality of the wasabi was amazing. It was the type that you could take bits from and pop them into your mouth with nothing else. There was a subtle sweetness from the raw wasabi, and it's usual sharpness, that just dissolved and mellowed out on your palate. I know, it sounds weird, but it was actually really good. The wasabi was so good that I was almost tempted to try the pickled ginger. Almost.

This was the "Japango Roll" - basically, their house/signature roll. It had avocado and crab in its centre, topped with seared scallop and salmon or tuna, a little bit of masago (fish roe), and a light drizzle of their house sauce. What was interesting was that there were 8 pieces, but in sets of 2, they had very minute differences. This was so perfect in that P and I could try the same delicate taste at the same time and compare them together.

This was their "Sashimi Don". It had such an amazing variety of simple flavours that worked together so beautifully. I felt myself to be almost in a slow motion trance while eating it. There was fatty tuna, red tuna, salmon, cucumber, tamago (sweet egg), crab, turnip, nori (seaweed), and masago (fish roe), all over a bed of sushi rice. It came with a dish of hot sauce, similar to gochujang (Korean hot sauce), but we didn't want to tarnish everything going on in that magical bowl...

Even given all of the options available in the Canadian New York that is Toronto, if I was in town, I would go back to Japango in a heartbeat. This is the sort of place that calms my fury with the 13% tax in Ontario. Our dinner was only around $40, which in some sense is pretty amazing for a sushi dinner for 2. Part of it was that most other items on the menu (with the exception of things like blue fin tuna D:) were not as unique as what we had picked. So, we decided to leave dinner as it was. All in all, it was a perfect ending to our brief, but food-filled vacation!

-M