Miku: Waterfront and Miku Kaiseki birthday dinner
This year, my fiancé Kelvin and I are turning 30 years old 😆! For Kelvin’s birthday dinner, we went to Miku, a Japanese restaurant in downtown Vancouver. We actually went to Miku for our first Valentine’s Day almost 5 years ago, so it was nice to be back. At that time, we had a special Valentine’s Day set menu but this time, we ordered off of their regular menu.
Miku offers kaiseki, which is like a multi-course tasting menu. They have two kaiseki options – the Waterfront Kaiseki at $135 per person and the Miku Kaiseki at $180 per person. The whole table needs to commit to a kaiseki menu (you cannot share one kaiseki) but you are allowed to order one Waterfront kaiseki and one Miku kaiseki and share both – and that is exactly what we did!
Recommended: Read about our 2019 Valentine’s Day at Miku with the special Valentine’s Day menu. Beware of price inflation 😢
Drinks at Miku
Bergamot sour ($16) + Little emperor ($8)
To start off, I order a cocktail and Kelvin orders a mocktail.
The bergamot sour is a 2oz cocktail that uses earl grey amaretto, yuzu, lemon, egg white, and togarashi. It is a similar taste to whiskey or bourbon sour with more of a Japanese twist. They also salt the rim with some spice and salt – a yummy cocktail!
The little emperor has fig syrup, yuzu, and ginger ale – also a lemon/fruity drink.
Waterfront kaiseki ($135 per person)
I am going to structure this post by listing out each course in each kaiseki, but when you order both to share, they do bring out both first courses at the same time so it’s not like you eat one kaiseki after another one.
Amuse bouche
The amuse bouche is a “chef’s feature” which basically just means whatever the chef feels like making. We were pretty happy to see a large oyster with some caviar and a scallop sashimi with ikura. These are both one biters but light and refreshing.
Lobster ceviche
The next course is a lobster ceviche. It is quite small and sits in a small bowl of yuzu dashi. The lobster meat is mixed with some salsa verde into a cake-like structure and topped with (alot of) kaiso caviar.
I’m actually ok with the size of this lobster ceviche – you can get around 4 bites wrapped in seaweed of this. I did find the dashi to be quite sour because of the yuzu.
Feature sashimi
In this photo you will actually see the featured sashimi platter for both the Waterfront kaiseki and the Miku kaiseki. Both plates have hamachi, scallop, and tuna (2 slices each). The only difference is that the Miku kaiseki (the more expensive one) also give you a piece of fatty tuna otoro (but just one!).
All the sashimi was fresh and delicious! My favourite was the otoro of course, but the hamachi was quite good as well.
Miku also gives us 2 different soy sauces – one is a regular soy sauce and the other is their in-house sweet soy sauce. We were recommended to dip the fatty otoro in the Miku soy sauce.
Kyoto Saikyo miso sablefish
The entree for the Waterfront kaiksei is a miso sablefish and lucky me cause I am a sablefish girl. This one is served on a very interesting plate that can hold a dallop of beet purée. Under the sablefish, they have some wild rice medley and some mushrooms and tomatoes.
The sablefish was cooked well as it was tender and flaky. The portion size is a little small for an entree and since we were sharing it, we both finished our half in two bites.
Miku signature sushi selection
Next we have a sushi platter with all of Miku’s signature sushi and rolls. There are 8 pieces in total and you can order any of these off of their al le carte menu. In the back we have an ebi oshi, saba oshi, salmon oshi, and then a king salmon nigiri, negitoro sushi, some sort of snapper sushi, and the red wave roll and miku roll.
Out of the 8, my favourites are the miku roll and salmon oshi. The salmon oshi at Miku is OG because I feel like they were one of the first Japanese restaurants to offer pressed aburi sushi with mayo. I still remember being 20 years old and broke and just ordering the salmon oshi for $18 😭 and that was my dinner. The miku roll is also one of my favourites because it is rolled in tobiko so it gives it a nice popping texture in your mouth.
Green tea opera
In this photo, you will see both desserts for the Waterfront kaiseki and the Miku kaiseki. The green tea opera cake is on the left.
We really liked the green tea opera cake! It has layers of green tea génoise, matcha butter cream,
dark chocolate ganache, azuki bean cream, a hazelnut wafer, and matcha ice cream on the side. It is a perfect balance of sweetness from the chocolate and not-sweetness from the matcha. We also like the texture because of the hazelnut wafer (some crunch!).
Miku kaiseki ($180 per person)
Iwanori butter Atlantic lobster
This is the first course of the Miku Kaiseki. It is very small but placed on a large plate. We have 2 pieces of lobster, one on top of a pea purée, the other piece is on top of a corn purée. In the middle there is a scallop-corn crisp.
It is a tasty little one biter and you get a decent piece of lobster meat in your one bite. I see this more like an amuse bouche because it is so small. The scallop corn crisp was really light and unique – tastes kind of like those crispy egg roll cookies but more corn tasting.
Iwate wagyu croquette
When I read croquette on the menu, this presentation wasn’t what I was expecting. Again, the portion is very small and the croquette are the 3 small balls on the plate. Around these croquettes there is a yuzu crème fraîche and a black truffle snow.
It’s hard to tell this is wagyu because it is battered and fried and also because of how small it is. In this case, I feel like they could have substituted any meat and it would’ve tasted relatively the same. The black truffle snow sounded intriguing, but it didn’t give off that much truffle flavour.
Feature sashimi
Again, it’s almost the same platter of sashimi as the Waterfront kaiseki except it comes with a piece of otoro. The “smoke show” liquid nitrogen is kind of cool but also it’s just for show.
Hokkaido scallop mousse
This is probably one of the prettiest and strangest dishes I’ve ever had in my life. It is a pretty big piece of scallop but it’s sitting in this foam that looks like a bubble bath. This foam/bubble substance is what they have labeled as umeshu espuma. Umeshu is like a plum liquor and espuma is basically foam in gastro cooking. Because it is bubbles, it has a very faint taste and mostly it is sweet due to the plum liquor.
On top of the scallop, there’s a little bit of Kaviari caviar, and around the scallop is a charred apple purée. We thought this was kind of a strange pairing and this dish wasn’t really savoury at all. In fact, it mostly tasted like apple and plum – a kind of sweet, fruity thing. The crispy thing on top is see-through and very pretty but didn’t taste like much. Overall, this dish was very whimsical but I don’t know if I would say it is tasty.
Surf & turf
The entree for the Miku kaiseki is a surf & turf. For the surf portion of this dish, we have one selva prawn, which kind of tastes like a regular grilled shrimp. For the turf portion, we have a shio koji filet mignon. The filet mignon was fatty and tender – very delicious.
To pair with these two things, there is a satsumaimo gratin – thin layers of potatoes stacked on top of each other into a rectangle shape. There are also some veggies – pickled, eggplant and mushroom and a peppercorn jus.
Aburi Prime
For the sushi portion of this kaiseki, it’s a chef’s nigiri omakase. These nigiris are all unique and not always a part of Miku’s regular menu. The servers explained each nigiri but I don’t remember everything 😅 so from my memory, here we have 2 different snappers, a mackerel, fatty tuna, uni, snow crab, spot prawn and squid. Each nigiri has different toppings sprinkled on top to give it some extra flavour (they dont’ serve soy sauce with their sushi courses). The most interesting topping I found was mustard with the fatty tuna as it is not often seen in Japanese cuisine.
Peach earl grey mousse
The peach earl grey mousse dessert is on the right of this photo. It is the same size as the green tea opera cake from the Waterfront kaiseki.
In this cake, they use vanilla diplomat and peach jam. There is a scoop of earl grey ice cream and salted egg yolk crumble. This cake had a more “flowery” taste to it and overall it is a softer/smoother texture because it is mostly mousse.
Final thoughts
Loewe’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
We had a very nice and long dinner at Miku, trying each course of our 2 kaisekis. We were also seated at a very spacious table for 4 and had a beautiful view of the water 😍!
Our dinner after tax and tip ends up being around $411 💸💸💸, but we tell ourselves it’s fine because it’s our 30th birthday and we can splurge this year.
Recommended: Read our review of Kissa Tanto’s $150 omakase for our birthday dinner last year.
The real question is: is it worth it?
I don’t even want to compare it to our Valentine’s Day dinner 5 years ago because that set menu was $98 per person. But if we look at the Waterfront kaiseki ($135) vs. the Miku kaiseki ($180), here are some of my thoughts:
- Waterfront kaiseki has 6 courses and the Miku kaiseki has 7, so you are paying a $45 difference for 1 course/different items
- For the two appetizers, I liked the waterfront kaiseki better.
- The sashimi platter is essentially the same and one piece of otoro didn’t make the Miku kaiseki that much more special.
- For the entree, I liked the surf & turf from the Miku kaiseki more. However, the filet mignon wasn’t wagyu or anything.
- Sushi platter was an easy win for Miku kaiseki. The nigiri are more expensive with fatter cuts and uni.
- Dessert – Waterfront kaiseki wins with the green tea opera.
Overall, I have to say the Miku kaiseki is better even though $180 per person is a significant amount. But I mean $135 isn’t cheap either so maybe just go with the more expensive one.
If you are a sushi lover and often go to omakase, you will know that omakase in Vancouver is not cheap to begin with. Some sushi restaurants will give you 10 pieces of nigiri and charge you $180 so in this context, the Miku kaiseki is actually a steal since they give you 8 pieces of nigiri in their 1 sushi course 😂.
The sushi course is actually what really did it for me. I guess the sushi and the entree course. Because before these two courses, Kelvin and I were thinking we may need to order more things since the portions were so small. However, the entree and sushi courses combined did fill us up.
Now that we’ve tried both kaisekis at Miku, we kind of feel like we’ve tried everything at Miku. We are likely to order al le carte the next time we return to Miku.
Sincerely, Loewe