Bistro Sakana: $100 birthday omakase in Yaletown

My boyfriend and I are two days apart and we celebrate our birthdays by blowing a lot of money on food. For my boyfriend’s birthday dinner, I took him for omakase at Sakana Bistro.

Related: Read where he took me for my birthday dinner here.

Omakase means “leave it up to the chef”. Your multi-course meal is determined by the chef and what ingredients are fresh and available. Omakase can be just sushi or it can be a Kaiseki style, which can be all kinds of Japanese dishes.

Related: Read about my recent sushi omakase experience.

Bistro Sakana is a fusion Japanese restaurant located on the trendy strip of Yaletown. We have visited Bistro Sakana before for Dine Out and had a really positive experience.

I recommend directly calling to make a reservation if you want bar seating and if you want to know ahead of time what the omakase menu for the day is. I wasn’t able to request for omakase on Opentable when I reserved the table, so once we ordered the omakase, we really had no idea what to expect aside from the fact that it will be around 9 courses.

We didn’t receive an omakase menu so most of these course titles in this review are just from my memory and notes on what the server told us it was. Hopefully it will help give you an idea of what to expect if you are thinking of trying Bistro Sakana’s omakase because their main menu also does not tell you what you will get.

Note that the omakase takes 2.5 hours to complete so you will need to make a reservation time that is more than 2 hours before their closing hours.

Interior

Bistro Sakana is quite a small restaurant and has always been packed when I went. Our reservation time was 7:30 pm and when we were leaving at 9:30 pm, they still had reservations for tables of 8 people for 9:45 pm.

Their restaurant layout is split into patio or inside seating. The patio area has a roof and in the winter they add extra heating and flaps to stop cold wind and rain from coming in. Our table was against the wall with the black sofa right in between the patio and the inside seating.

First course

Sesame tofu and seaweed sunomono

The tofu is a sesame tofu so it tastes different from regular tofu. It isn’t just cooked in a sesame sauce, the whole piece tastes like a sesame dessert. It is thick and very smooth and soft. It sits inside a bowl of ponzu sauce and has a sprinkle of king crab meat on top.

The leaf has gold sprinkles on it, which is kind of extra and I also wondered how to eat it. I carefully opened up the lettuce that was covering the second bowl and scrapped the little pieces of gold into the sunomono.

Usually, sunomono is white and has a sour vinegar taste to it to help you prepare your appetite for the next courses. This sunomono also doesn’t taste like regular sunomono because it is made from seaweed, hence the darker colour. It has pieces of sea urchin and shrimp on top.

Second course

Sweet prawn, mini crab and oyster

When they placed down our second course, we were very excited. It was beautiful!

The live sweet prawn is very fresh. The head’s antenna things are still moving around when the server puts it in front of us.

We don’t eat the prawn head as they will be frying it for us later, but we eat the tail in one bite with soy sauce (after removing the wasabi on top lol) and it is so delicious. Refreshing, juicy and sweet!

The little crab is from Japan and is around the size of my two thumbs put together. It is deep-fried so you eat it as a whole.

It is crunchy and you may need to be careful that pieces don’t scratch your gum. The inside and guts of the little crab has a lot of flavour for something so small.

The oyster is a nice cold appetizer. Not sure what kind of oyster it is but it is from Japan and tastes a bit on the sweeter side.

The prawn heads come back deep fried and similar to the little crab, you can eat it whole. The head/brain was juicy and tasted really great with the semi-dryness and crunchiness of the shell and antennas.

Third course

Assorted sashimi

This course took a while to prepare and it’s mostly because of the aesthetics of this bowl of ice. There is a cute authentic wasabi board and two plates of ponzu sauce. There are 5 pieces of sashimi for each person (10 pieces total):

1. Japanese flounder (1.5 pieces, white on the right)
2. Japanese snapper with radish (on top of the lemon)
3. Hamachi (bottom left)
4. Chuutoro bluefish tuna (top left)

The selected sashimi are premium fish and ones I would never choose for a regular sashimi day. My favourite is the chuutoro bluefish tuna – so sweet and fresh. Aside from that, I find the sashimi is a bit too thinly sliced. Either that or I wish we had more than five pieces. The bowl and the fish head seem too much for just decoration.

I also recommend using soy sauce with the sashimi instead of the ponzu sauce, which is too light to bring out the flavours of the fish.

Fourth course

Japanese lobster

This is a steamed Japanese lobster with ponzu sauce. This is the whole thing, not just the tail. It’s already cut in half so you scrape out the meat from the middle like a lobster tail.

This course doesn’t feel as fresh as the previous two, perhaps because it was steamed. The ponzu sauce is a good pairing to the lobster meat. Every bite I took had juice dripping out of my mouth. Interesting to try but I wouldn’t order it again.

Fifth course

Wagyu

This course attracted the most attention to our table when it arrived. It has its own burner with a tinfoil on top and leaf to cook the wagyu beef and shiitake mushrooms.

It is a cute course and the server taught us how to cook the meat effectively. Basically you have to move all the meat underneath the mushrooms, although they place the meat on top of the mushrooms for aesthetics.

The cooking only took a few minutes. I recommend requesting for a bowl of rice as the miso sauce is very rich with just the meat and the mushrooms. Mix it with some rice and it not only fills you up more, but gives a greater balance to this course.

I’ve only had wagyu several times – once as a steak and once as a carpaccio. Both times I felt like I wasn’t eating wagyu (just a regular cut of beef). The way they make you cook the wagyu yourself made the wagyu more delicious in my opinion.

Sixth course

Chawanmushi

Chawanmushi is an egg custard dish that uses savoury ingredients instead of sweet. Therefore, it’s not a dessert but part of a meal.

Our chawanmushi came in a cute little pot and was very hot. The egg custard is smooth and silky and slides down your throat with the umami dashi broth. Like the sesame tofu, it has some king grab sprinkled on the top.

This dish is interesting. All the other courses so far feels very fusion restaurant quality, but this dish feels as if I am having a homemade meal in a Japanese home. It gives off a feeling of warmth and comfort food on a rainy day.

Seventh course

Selected aburi sushi

The aburi course changes every day, but for our omakase we had four different pieces. We ate it in this order:

1. Super white tuna
2. Angus beef
3. Black cod
4. Salmon oshi

The super white tuna is torched, which gives it a super white colour. It almost looks like a small slab of chicken breast with the miso sauce on top.

The angus beef reminds of us the wagyu from the earlier course. I think it would’ve tasted better with a little garlic chip on top instead of the spring onion garnish.

The black cod is my favourite aburi of the night. It is sweet and melts in your mouth, along with a little zest from the slice of lime.

The sushi oshi is a classic favourite with a middle filling of more salmon meat. The rice to fish ratio is well balanced. It tastes just as good as salmon oshi you can get from Miku or Minami.

None of the aburi came with additional sauces and our soy sauce was taken away at the beginning, but there is no need to add any.

Eighth course

Dessert

I suppose if you are a big dessert lover, this dessert will disappoint you.

I actually broke my little wooden spoon eating the mochi. Kind of embarrassing but yes it is harder than it looks. The mochi has mango ice cream inside, and we wondered if they just got it from a box in T&T and placed it inside a little bowl.

The melon piqued our interest because of how sweet it is. We even Googled the skin to see if it is a Japanese melon.

As some of you may know, Japan has premium fruits that can cost more than $100 USD for a single peach or bunch of grapes. Judging by the melon skin, it is definitely a Japanese melon. Maybe not a $100 melon, but probably a $15 one, which is still expensive for a fruit.

The Japanese cheesecake is not the fluffy ones you will find at Uncle Tetsu or Castella. It is rich and made me think perhaps such a small slice is good enough.

Final thoughts

Our bill came to $240 after tax and tip. We didn’t order any drinks and our omakase was $100 per person even though the menu said it starts at $80.

Our favourite course was the second one with the live sweet prawn and tiny crab. The sweet prawn was much bigger than the one we had at Miku for Valentine’s Day.

Our least favourite course was either the Japanese lobster or the dessert. The reason for both is probably because it didn’t taste that different from other things we’ve tasted before.

In general, we do think the $100 price point for this omakase is worth it. Competitively, it is a lower-end omakase compared to many other Vancouver choices that only feature sushi/nigiri. This omakase had all types of different Japanese dishes. All were presented beautifully.

If we order omakase again at Bistro Sakana, I would call ahead of time to know the menu beforehand. They are able to change the omakase menu if you have specific things you want to be added or removed from the menu. This will result in a different price range depending on the dishes you choose to add or remove.

We were full after this dinner, but not to the point where we felt like throwing up. Sometimes I believe that people mistake being really really full for a “worth-it” meal. I disagree. I think a “worth-it” meal comes from careful meal planning. Each course should accentuate each other as you progress into more heavy courses, and you should not feel like throwing up from being so full at the end of it. That just means to me the balance is off.

We notice that often times, Japanese restaurants are very good at keeping this balance in their multi-course meals and Bistro Sakana is added to our list.

Service was excellent for such a tiny and busy restaurant. The server helped us cook our wagyu and also helped me go to the washroom on a crutch.

For a special occasion, the two of us had a lovely time and it was exciting to not know what comes next.

Sincerely, Loewe