Fushimi Authentic Japanese Cuisine

Date: June 1, 2012

Location: 7501 Woodbine Ave. (south of Hwy 407), Markham

Website: http://www.fushimi.ca/

Meal: lunch

My thoughts:

I came here today with a friend to celebrate our one month birthdays! (No, we don't actually celebrate our monthly birthdays. We're just embarrassed to admit that we were still celebrating our birthdays six weeks after the fact.)

My friend has been frequenting this place as of late (10 times in the past 6 weeks) and suggested we come here. I was excited to try this place and see if it measures up to A Taste of Japan, which was replaced with this restaurant and was in my family's regular rotation of restaurants. Anyway, my friend and I had the AYCE, and this was what we had:

Miso soup: I didn't have this, but this is pretty standard and pretty hard to mess up, in my opinion.

Avocado salad: lettuce salad with avocado slices and creamy ginger dressing. I was impressed by the fact that the avocado slices - albeit raw -  were so big!

 

Gyozas: pan-fried beef dumplings. A little greasy, but the filling was very good and the dough crispy. Yum.

Funky chicken: crispy chicken, asparagus, topped with avocado, black pepper steak and drizzled with house and eel sauce. I love the name! Interesting it is called funky chicken and not funky beef/steak when I couldn't taste the chicken. I'm normally not a fan of extremely rare beef, but it worked well here.

Salmon sushi: salmon sashimi with rice. Nothing special. Not much salmon though.

Red dragon: cucumber, avocado and tuna sashimi roll. (Far right in picture below.) Pretty good, but not as good as... 

Green dragon: eel, avocado, shrimp tempura and cucumber roll. (Middle roll in picture below.) Pretty good. I think this was my favourite today. Avocado makes everything taste great!

Spicy salmon roll: salmon sashimi with spicy sauce. (Far left in picture below.) Nothing special. 

Spicy scallop trim ramen: Because I had no idea what 'scallop trim' was and the waitress had such a hard time explaining what this was, my curiosity was piqued and I just had to order this! I found out it is the thin membrane surrounding scallop - you'll know what I'm talking about if you have ever prepared live scallops. Anyway, the texture was similar to onion skins to me, but slightly crunchier. And I'm well aware this isn't a noodle restaurant, but I was a bit disappointed that the ramen wasn't chewy (which, to people of my culture, is an indicator of freshness). The fried crab was amazing!

I noticed as I was writing this blog that there was a back page on the menu, which is unfortunate because everything on this page looked really good. I think I’ll come back just to try these things out so that I can fairly judge Fushimi against Maison du Japon across the street. We were short on time; otherwise, we would have ordered more. 

My verdict: For $13.99 (Fri-Sun, or $12.99 Mon-Thurs), this was not bad for an AYCE restaurant with typical AYCE-quality food. I definitely like A Taste of Japan better, but to be fair, it isn't AYCE, so I'm not comparing apples with apples here. Also, from what I had today, I also like Maison du Japon - I find their quality and offerings much better than Fushimi's, but I'd be willing to give this a second shot.