Doesn't TaZte Like Chicken

Location: Torarenbo
8191 Park Road,
Richmond BC

Author: My Husband

Those of us who are in Vancouver have been living through the dog days of summer these past several weeks. The mid 20’s temperature and the harsh sunshine have ganged up to make the interior of our home swelteringly warm, and that has really curbed our appetites for hot dinners. So lately, we’ve been having more than our fair share of sushi.

Christina and I do not patronize any of the all-you-can-eat sushi joints. The AYCE menus do not interest us much, and we simply do not eat enough to make the prices worth our while. We try to eat at middle-of-the-road Japanese restaurants that strike a reasonable balance between quality and price, though admittedly, such places are difficult to find.

One such place, in our humble opinion, is a smallish restaurant in Richmond named Torarenbo. The restaurant setup is pretty interesting – the chefs behind the sushi counter are Japanese, but the front-of-house staff is mostly (all?) Chinese. I don’t think I have encountered a restaurant with this staffing mix in Vancouver – has anybody else?

At any rate, Torarenbo has won quite a bit of our business these few years. The service is friendly, and the chefs know what they are doing. The place is almost always packed, so reservations are a must.

Here’s what we had when we visited two nights ago:

Many Japanese restaurants serve oysters on the half shell at attractive prices. At many smallish places, ordering live shell fish tends to be a crapshoot; sometimes you get fresh briny oysters, other times, you get detritus that is well past their peak. At Torarenbo, we’ve gotten pretty fresh oysters when we’ve ordered them. This time, it was 5 Mary Point (I think!) oysters that were creamy and mildy salty. The ponzu mignonette was a little strong for these delicate tasting oysters, but they were still good eats.

We had some cream-of-corn croquettes that were very crispy on the outside and moist on the inside. Unlike French croquettes where the mashed potatoes are on the dry side, the texture of these Japanese croquettes was almost runny. This interplay of textures and flavours – savory mashed potato vs the slightly sweet creamed corn filling – makes this one of our favourite dishes at Torarenbo.

This was one of the specials available on the day we visited. Shima Aji is a medium fat, rich-tasting fish that has a toothsome texture. Think Hamachi, but with bolder flavours and less crunch. This was very nice, though a little on the pricey side.

The nigiri at Torarenbo is competently prepared. I haven’t eaten at top-notch places like Urasawa’s or even Tojo’s, so I don’t have a reference for what top-quality nigiri is like. At Torarenbo, there is a good ratio of rice to ingredient, and the knife work looks good. We’ve never run across any sinewy or chewy pieces, and what we’ve had always tasted fresh. In our order, the unagi and hamachi were pretty enjoyable, and my wife thought the saba was tops. The uni was alright; it was not as fresh or creamy as live uni, but it was nowhere near its past due date. The ebi, sadly, was overcooked and tasteless. I imagine the chef used packaged ebi for this.

The amaebi is served with a deep-fried head. This was very good, and Christina ordered the amaebi more for this than the nigiri itself.

We had some chopped scallop maki to fill up . Not the prettiest of maki, but it tasted pretty good. Scallops were still toothsome and not overpowered by the mayo.

After sushi, we always like to finish up with something warm. I find that a warm course helps to settle the stomach after eating raw seafood. At Torarenbo, I always have an onigiri as my last course. They do it very well here – the rice is not burnt, not overly hard, and there is a generous amount of filling in it.

We enjoy our meals at Torarenbo – they serve up good quality at reasonable prices. With so many sushi restaurants in Vancouver, you’d think there be more places like Torarenbo, but this isn’t the case. I’m sure there are similar places out there we haven’t been to yet – for our Vancouver readers, what are you favourite sushi haunts?

Location: My tiny kitchen

This post is dedicated to my friend IDL.

My friend IDL discovered this blueberry cake recipe from the magazine Fine Cooking. He showed me the recipe one day and after I read it, I said to him “this cake sounds dry”. Not believing me, IDL went ahead and made the cake. I’m so glad he didn’t listen to me (come to think of it, he never does!). On the next day, IDL let a few of us tried his first attempt. I was in love with the cake ever since and I have made this cake again and again. This is easily the best blueberry cake that you would ever taste.

Below is the recipe taken from Fine Cooking.

Ingredients
- 8 oz (1 cup) unsalted butter, soften to room temperature
- 6 oz cream cheese, soften to room temperature
- 2 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 5 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
- 2 1/2 cups fresh blueberries, washed and let dry
- 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
- 1/4 table salt

1. Heat oven at 350F.

2. Butter and flour a non stick bundt pan.

3. In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and salt until combine. This takes about 1 minute at medium speed.

4. Add sugar, 1/2 cup at a time. Beat sugar, butter and cheese until fluffy. This takes about 5 minutes at medium speed.

5. Add egg, one at a time, beat egg into batter until fully incorporated before adding the next.

6. Sift flour, salt and baking powder.

7. Turn the mixer to low speed, add flour. Beat until just incorporated. This takes less than 1 minute.

8. Using a spatula, gently fold in blueberries.

9. Pour batter into bundt pan. Batter will be thick. Use the spatula to smooth out the top.

10. Bake in the oven for 1 hour or until a skewer or cake tester comes out clean.

11. Let cool and enjoy.

The original recipe has icing poured all over the cake. It also has lime zest baked into the cake. I like to keep my cake tasting simple so I always omit them.

Besides baking, IDL also likes to barbeque. Actually, using the word “like” is an understatement. I know IDL would barbeque every day if it never rains in Vancouver. Last weekend, IDL put on the BBQ chef hat again and barbequed some chicken, ribs and steaks for a group of us. Our tummies were really, really happy that night.

Location: Guangzhou, China

Author: My Husband

Two weeks ago, I traveled to China to work on a business strategy engagement for one of our largest clients there. In addition to the promise of interesting work, I also felt buoyed by the expectation that I would have lots of opportunity to eat good Chinese food and write many blog posts about the same. So before the trip, I gathered recommendations from friends familiar with my destination and made plans to visit those places…

The plan began well enough. After a longish 11-hr flight from Vancouver to Beijing, I found myself at Capital Airport with 4 hrs to kill before my onward flight to Guangzhou. While waiting for my flight in Terminal 3C, I saw an Ajisen Ramen outlet near my gate, so I scooted into the place to get some noodles. For 26 rmb (less than $5 Canadian), I got the following bowl of noodles plus a bottle of Coke. As far as airport pricing went, it was good value for money. The noodles weren’t bad either. Funnily enough, the ramen place was located right next to a KFC, which was just crazy hopping busy. Colour me surprised, but I’ve always thought that Chinese folks would prefer noodles to greasy fried chicken. I guess times are indeed a’changin.

Sidenote #1: Like most recent infrastructure construction in Beijing, the Capital Airport’s Terminal 3 was built on a monster scale, with soaring ceilings and long concourses that take forever to walk from one end to the other (You can hire electric buggies to ferry you around for 10rmb per pax or 20rmb for the entire cart). Just to give you an idea of the size of the place: where other airports link different terminals via monorail, Beijing Airport’s Terminal 3 requires monorails to link its three concourses together!

Sidenote #2: If you ever find yourself connecting at Beijing Airport’s T3, I’ve got two suggestions. (i) Look for food in the “C” concourse. F&B selection is exceedingly limited in the “E” concourse, which plays home to most Star Alliance international flights. (ii) Head to your assigned gate a little early. There are many gates which require bussing off to remote aircraft stands, and if you get there late, you will NOT be able to hoof it to your plane.

So, with photos of my noodles at Ajisen carefully tucked away in my camera, I headed off to Guangzhou with visions of great Cantonese cuisine dancing in my head. And…for the next two weeks, that’s where they stayed. Despite the best laid plans of mice and men, I did not once set foot in any of the restaurants recommended to me. Yeah, reality turned out quite different indeed…

The first thing was the hotel I put up at. The Shangri-la GZ (a proper right-sized Shang, unlike the *ahem* Vancouver one) is a nice place, but just too far away from the city center. Heading back to the hotel after work to change before dinner was out of the question. As someone averse to schlepping around town in businesswear after work, dinner ended up in restaurants close to the office. This is not to say the food was bad. In fact, my dinners included some Chinese culinary styles – Hubei and Hebei – that I’ve never had before. Hubei food is very much Hunanese in style, focusing on bold and spicy flavours. Hebei food, to my uninitiated tastebuds anyway, seemed to highlight both sweet and sour, with lamb being a particularly popular meat. Naturally, there were some Cantonese, Sichuan, and Shanghainese food thrown into the rotation for good measure. However, these meals were shared with my Chinese colleagues; not wanting to chance their reaction to food photography, I decided not to take any snaps of the food at all.

During the two weeks, I also had non-Chinese food on two occasions at the hotel.

The first was at Nadaman, which as it turned out, is a chain of quite well-known Japanese restaurants that has an affinity for locating in Shangri-las. I wish I could say the food was spectacular, but it was surprisingly pedestrian. I had 6 pieces of nigiri sushi, including a nugget of ohtoro that really wasn’t that melt-in-your-mouth good, a chawanmushi, some shiso-flavoured beef fried-rice, and a glass of Kirin. All at a price ($80+) that’s easily over twice what I’d pay in Vancouver. Value, Nadaman ain’t. Moderately above average sushi, admittedly in a very nicely decorated restaurant, seems to be the standard play at the Nadaman in Guangzhou.

The second was at Il Forno, the self-proclaimed best Italian restaurant in Guangzhou. I had some buffalo mozzarella salad (with pomodoro) as well as a memorable osso bucco. It wasn’t the cheapest Italian meal, but the quality was pretty good. The flavour and tenderness of the veal shank was enough to put some Italian places here in Vancouver to shame, and there was not a single Italian chef in sight. From what I can of the open kitchen, it was manned by a troupe of pretty young local chefs – very impressive I’d have to say.

Both Nadaman and Il Forno were very dark and sexy places – good places to take a date, but not good places to snap photos. So I’m afraid my descriptions above are the best I can do.

So, that’s two weeks wrapped up in one short post. Let me end by showing what the sky looks like in Guangzhou. It was like this for two weeks; I think I only saw faint patches of blue once or twice. Most likely, it was smog caused by all the industrial and manufacturing facilities that dot the region around Guangzhou’s Pearl River Delta.

And strangely enough, for a country as steeped in tradition as China, this pagoda was the only traditional looking thing around the vicinity the hotel. Granted, Guangzhou isn’t particularly known for its antiquities, but it’s a little strange nonetheless…

Sidenote #3: For those of you who share a more than a passing interest in aviation like myself, I had the chance to fly on the B772, A332, and B744 on this trip. I’m a big fan of Boeing products, and have been know to arrange my travel schedules around planes I prefer to fly. But I’ll have to say, after flying the 772 and 332 back-to-back, the Airbus is a quieter aircraft to fly than the Boeing. It’s especially good for sleep on longer flights… Do any other aircraft nuts read this blog?