Takenaka: Greater Vancouver Food Truck Festival

The Greater Vancouver Food Truck Festival holds events throughout the year featuring Vancouver’s food trucks. For those who are not familiar with food trucks, think of a restaurant on wheels. Everything is cooked and prepared in the truck! They usually park in high-traffic areas like parks and downtown areas where you can sit in the city and enjoy the food.

We attended the Shop the Block food truck festival located at Brentwood on July 10. Different food trucks are scheduled for different days, but the most popular food truck on the day we went was Takenaka, a Japanese food truck providing Japanese bentos and hand rolls.

This review is based on a takeout experience during the Greater Vancouver Food Truck Festival.

Food truck festival

This is Takenaka’s food truck. It has quite a pretty blue design with a big window for taking orders and serving takeout orders.

I’m not very familiar with parking permit and rules for food trucks, but usually their food truck is located downtown and too far to deliver to my place, so I was excited to try them out at the food truck festival. Compared to their menu on online delivery apps, their food truck menu is more limited. The food truck does not offer any of their bentos, for example.

The food festival was taking place on essentially a big empty lot. They had a picnic/seating area and a stage in the far back where you can sit and eat and enjoy some music. The lot isn’t too big and there are only about 6-7 food trucks stationed in the area.

The line-up was pretty brutal. We waited 45 mins in line to give our order, only to find our most desired item (the blue-fin tuna handroll) was sold out! After ordering, we had to wait another 30-40 minutes before we got our food.

Food

We order a variety of items from their food truck menu.

Snow crab roll ($9)

Out of all their regular hand rolls, we chose to try this one as we love snow crab. The roll has snow crab meat, avocado, Kinshi-egg and tobikko. The roll looks small but it is quite hefty and loaded with lots of fillings. The crab meat didn’t taste fake or frozen, it seemed quite fresh. Overall, a nice roll that didn’t fall apart when eating.

Uni temaki ($15-18)

Since they were sold out of the blue-fin tuna temaki, we opted for the uni temaki instead. It has uni, snow crab, ikura, scallop, yuzu tobikko and a shiso leaf on top. A single portion is $15 and double is $18.

The presentation is pretty even though it takes up a lot of the takeout box lol. You basically roll this into a cone or roll yourself. Despite it’s half-empty appearance, it is big once you roll it up. Perhaps we are not professionals but it was hard to keep all the fillings inside when we rolled it up. Also, it is incredibly hard to share between 2 people.

The scallops were really large but we did find the uni to be a little more fishy than sweet.

Omakase aburi sushi ($22)

This item includes 8 pieces of daily omakase seared sushi complemented with garnishes and sweet soy sauce. Judging from our box, it looks like all the seared sushi has salmon on top. I’m not sure if they usually offer more variety in the fish that’s actually seared in the aburi sushi.

For the life of me I do not know for sure what garnishes are on here, but each piece tasted decent. There wasn’t too much mayo and the ratio from fish to rice was decent. I did find each piece to be quite large so even though it’s only 8 pieces, it feels more filling than you’d think.

Seafood bara chirashi ($18)

We also order one of their rice bowls – the seafood bara chirashi. It has colourful sashimi cubes, snow crab, scallop, salmon roe, sweet egg omelet, radish sprouts, shiso marinated kelp, and tobikko spread on top of original sushi rice.

The rice bowl seems quite small but it is heavily layered and compact with a lot of rice. The rice is nicely seasoned so that is good as I frown upon normal cooked rice with sashimi. The assorted sashimi cubes are pretty and taste pretty fresh. Once we mixed everything up, I found that i really liked the tobikko that bursts into little pockets of flavour with the rice.

Final thoughts

Loewe’s rating: ⭐⭐⭐

I think the quality of Takenaka is quite good, especially since it is a food truck. Presentation was also very nice of each dish. I’m not sure if I have a favourite item out of the things we ordered, but everything was above average compared to sushi and Japanese food we’ve had inside an actual restaurant. I think the reason why I don’t have a favourite was because I was still salty about not trying the blue-fin tuna temaki lol. I would recommend their rolls and temaki over the other items on their food truck menu.

Prices are high so don’t expect Takenaka to be your Sushi Town or Sushi California.

Given the long wait during the food truck festival, this dampened our mood and may have also lowered our excitement to eat (more like omg finally we can eat). For over 1 hour wait to order and eat, I would say it’s not worth it, but if there’s no line I’d recommend you give it a try since the quality and ingredients are fresh.

Sincerely, Loewe