Itosugi offers good value omakase meal

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Itosugi Kappo Cuisine

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Where: 3648 West Broadway, Vancouver

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When: Lunch and dinner, Thursday to Tuesday. By reservation only.

Info and reservations: 604-779-8528. itosugikappocuisine.ca

With seven counter seats and two deuces adding up to 11 seats in all, Itosugi Kappo Cuisine feels a lot like Japan.

Not quite the sliver of a restaurant I visited in Tokyo, where some diners parked suitcases on the sidewalk as there wasn’t a square inch to spare inside. It still blows my mind that it’s perfectly safe to do that in Tokyo.

Itosugi, which opened in late May, is a welcome newcomer to Vancouver’s West Side with its stagnant restaurant birthrate. For one thing, it offers an awfully good deal. Multi-course omakase lunches and dinners cost half to a third the going price at $45 for lunch and $78 for dinner.

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Partly, it’s thanks to the no-frills room, albeit pleasant, with a Zen-like waterscape painting behind a chef’s area for preparing some of the kappo food.

Kappo, which means to ‘cut and cook’ refers to a chef-driven meal with the chef cooking in front of guests. It’s less formal and not as fancy as kaiseki, a more formal, seasonal multi-course dinner. The name Itosugi, by the way, refers to the family of cypress trees and in the restaurant you’ll find an Alaskan cypress counter taking centre stage as well as cypress wood panelling. 

Another reason for the good value — the owner, Alfred Chan, at 24, is a starter owner-chef with a year of culinary training at Vancouver Community College and experience at some Chinese restaurants.

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“I’m not a formally trained Japanese chef,” Chan says. “I’m self-taught.”

His sidekick Andrew Guan, another 20-something, has worked at restaurants including Toshi Sushi and Aritzia’s head office café under Yoshi Tabo, who’s been revered at Shijo, Blue Water Cafe and Raw Bar and Ki Modern Japanese.

In Itosugi’s very modest kitchen, an electric stove is the workhorse. I asked about the technically adept Combi Oven I spied in the tiny kitchen. Alas, it’s not working. And they couldn’t get a liquor licence because the restaurant lacks an accessible washroom with a hallway. Those in the know bring their own wine for a paltry $12 corkage fee, as three young, expensively dressed women did. One of them complimented another’s Birkin handbag. “This is a nice size,” came the casual reply about a bag that sells for between US$10,000 and US$60,000.

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Chan and Guan became friends in the way that 20-somethings do, via social media. Chan posted something about using the premium akasu, red vinegar, for his sushi rice. Guan responded with questions and soon they bonded over food.

At Itosugi, Guan is the sushi chef and Chan creates the cooked dishes. The sushi changes constantly, depending on what’s available, and cooked dishes change monthly. Guan uses local seafood rather than importing Japanese as it keeps food costs down and Chan haunts farmers markets for local ingredients to buy in smaller quantities. After the summer growing season, he’ll “have to find other ways,” he says.

The $48 omakase lunch offers two appetizers, 10 nigiri sushi and miso soup. Dinner is a nine-course affair with appetizer, sashimi, soup, steamed item, deep-fried item, grilled item, pickles, nine nigiri, the touchy-to-make tamago and dessert, roughly following the progression of a kaiseki meal. They’re doing a very good job — perhaps not to the standards of omakase offered at Masayoshi, Tojo’s or Stem, with their striking presentations but for the price, it’s a special and elevated experience.

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When I visited, we began with roasted kabocha squash with tomato, and asparagus with a sweet tofu dressing. The second course, ocean perch sashimi was translucent and oceany.

“It was still in rigor mortis when we got it,” Chan says.

A similar fish in Hokkaido sells for $80 to $100 per fish, he notes, a heck of a lot more than the B.C. version. And next to the sashimi, some really, really fresh-tasting wasabi with a fierce bite. No wonder. It’s from Malcolm Island, off the east coast of Vancouver Island. He gets a delivery every two weeks.

Next, suimono or a clear soup with Dungeness crab ball, a palate cleansing dish. The chef spritzed water on the lid of the lacquer soup bowl — a tradition preserved from a long-ago era meant to detect fingerprints, should someone attempt to poison an emperor.

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Chawanmushi, glistening with dots of ankake sauce — thickened dashi — came topped with fresh uni. For the fried item, scallop tempura with shredded kombu. For the grilled dish, we had rockfish with crispy scales or, in Japanese, kasayaki.

“The skin is like a chicharron, in a way,” Chan says. It’s named after kasa, or pine cone, for its resemblance.

The dish that followed countered the oils in the kasayaki — oyster on a shell, poached lightly to “remove the slipperiness,” endowed with a vinegared gel, ikura and thinly sliced cucumber.

Sushi chef Guan then stepped behind the chef’s table, cutting and serving nine nigiri sushi and a really well-made atsuyaki tamago. If you’ve seen the gyro Dreams of Sushi documentary profiling sushi master gyro Ono, you’ll have seen one of his disciples cry upon finally mastering the refined atsuyaki tamago. I don’t have gyro expectations and thought he did a very good job. At the counter, the nigiri are served piece by piece. For me, at a table, they were all assembled on a plate.

Sliced duck in broth, a traditional dish from Ishikawa prefecture, was poached in a thick dashi soy broth. It came together with some vegetables, simmered separately.

Lastly, gelatinous warabi mochi dusted in kinako or soybean powder. It’s made with bracken fern rhizome starch, not glutinous rice.

The duo might very well be young but they are both devotees of Japanese food offering a serious and seriously affordable omakase experience.

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