Takenaka Uni Bar: $168 Omakase for 2 people
I am married now 🥰! We signed the papers in June and afterwards, we celebrated with a nice dinner at the newly opened Takenaka Uni Bar in Gastown.
Takenaka started its roots as a food truck business, but now they have a physical restaurant location in the Gastown district of Vancouver. On their menu, they are offering a $168 omakase course for 2 people. Omakase means “leave it to the chef”!
Here is our experience and everything that came with the omakase.
The vibe
Takenaka Uni Bar is located kind of on the ends of Gastown, really close to Tekkaba, actually.
They are a small-medium sized restaurant with 3 loft-style levels. First floor is washrooms and a lobby, and the mid-floor has bar seating. The top floor has regular dining seating.
The space felt oddly familiar and I really felt like this place used to be a Rodney’s Oyster House or something 🧐 because it had the red brick walls, the white and wooden chairs and tables, etc. It also vaguely resembles the Guu in Gastown. It definitely looked more like a casual seafood restaurant than a Japanese restaurant.
There were two 4-seater tables near the window that had nice lighting and a view of the street/trees, but everything else inside was pretty dark/dim lighting.
Recommended: Read my review of Tekkaba, a Japanese izakaya in Gastown with a $78 omakase.
Food and drinks review
We ordered the $168 omakase for 2 people and added on a few additional items. Prices are in CAD and rounded to the nearest dollar for simplicity.
Uni colada ($16)
From their cocktail list, our server tells us the most popular cocktail is the uni colada, which is a combination of uni and a pina colada. For those who do not know what uni is, uni is sea urchin and this restaurant uses a lot of this ingredient in its dishes and drinks – hey, the place is called an uni bar!
I quite like pina coladas so I was expecting to really like this cocktail but to be honest it just wasn’t my cup of tea 😣. In this cocktail, they use white rum, fino, montenegro, coconut, uni mango foam, and chili. I found the taste to be overall kind of bitter and a slightly unpleasant aftertaste, instead of the usual fruity and sweet pina colada I am used to.
Luxury Japanese omelet ($13)
The only food item we added on was this luxury omelet. We saw a lot of tables had ordered this and it looked good so we also added it to our order even though the 2-person omakase would have been enough food for us.
This is a cold appetizer that is actually pretty big in size. The Japanese egg omelet is soft and a little sweet, with some yuzu (lemon) sauce, grated daikon (radish) and ikura (fish eggs).
I liked this appetizer and found the components to pair well with each other. I was surprised at the amount of ikura they top it off with but I guess the rest of this $13 dish is just egg and some radish. My only regret is that throughout our omakase, I feel like we actually eat a lot of daikon and ikura so I kind of wish we had ordered another dish instead to try different flavours/things.
First course: House-made fruit sake
To start off the omakase, you get 2 glasses of fruit sake. You can choose between 3 flavours – lychee, yuzu or momo (peach). We chose lychee and peach. They are both fruity and refreshing 😚, but the peach one was sweeter than the lychee one.
Second course: Fresh sashimi platter
The first course that arrived was this large sashimi platter. It comes with 3 kinds of sashimi – we had salmon, sockeye salmon and either horse mackerel. It also comes with 4 raw oysters and a box of uni.
I think this sashimi platter is decent to share with 2 people, although I wasn’t super impressed with the 3 types of sashimi we got (I was hoping for hamachi or a fatty tuna or fatty salmon 😖). But the raw oysters were fresh and I was satisfied with the quality and amount of uni that is in this platter. You can eat it with your other sashimis or there is some seaweed for you to wrap it in.
A similar al le carte menu item would be their small seafood platter priced at $60. It also comes with 3 kinds of sashimi and a tray of uni, but a dozen oysters.
Third course: Uni matcha soba
The next series of dishes are 3 appetizers chosen by the chef. On the day we went, our first appetizer was this cold matcha uni soba.
It is a small cup of green matcha soba noodles (very subtle matcha taste), uni of curse, Japanese yam, and quail egg with what the menu describes it as “truyu-jerry”. I’m going to assume this is actually the brownish jelly component next to the quail egg.
You mix it all up to eat and you get a very creamy and cold bite of soba – pretty good!
Regular price for this appetizer is $6.
Fourth course: Clams and mussels
Our next appetizer was this cute pot of clams and mussels. They are steamed in dashi and sake with some asparagus and tomatoes.
I thought the clams and mussels were fine, but I was expecting a much more flavourful broth 🙃. They provided some bread for us to dip the broth, but I just found it to taste bland and a little too salty.
Regular price for this dish is $28.
Fifth course: Manga wagyu hamburg steak
Our last of 3 appetizers was this Japanese-style wagyu hamburger steak. It came in a really cute presentation with a plastic fake bone sticking out of it (looks like something from One Piece 😜). On top, we have grated daikon and the steak is coated in an original steak sauce.
The portion isn’t big so it is more of an appetizer for 2 people, but I really liked the taste of this dish. It tasted like a very savoury meatball!
Sixth course: Luxury deluxe seafood bowl + miso soup
The main star dish of the omakase is this seafood bowl. It came in a really large bowl and is topped with uni, negitoro, herring row, real crab meat, cuttlefish, boiled shrimp, baby sardines, ikura, Japanese yam and shiso.
I felt this bowl looked very appetizing and it was certainly large enough to share between 2 people. Again, I felt like I was eating a lot of ikura throughout this meal, and they actually had 2-3 different types of ikura mixed in here. I liked the uni and ikura combination, but do wish there was a bit more sashimi as there is only some negitoro, crab meat and small shrimps/baby sardines.
Regular price for this dish is $48.
This came with 2 bowls of miso soup – pretty average tasting but had quite a bit of toppings inside like mushrooms and seaweed.
Seventh course: Salt caramel pudding + Matcha panna cotta
Time for dessert! The omakase comes with 2 desserts – the salted caramel pudding and the matcha panna cotta. We love Japanese desserts and even though these were small, it was big enough to share with 2 people and we were already full from all the courses before.
The pudding had smooth egg custard with salted caramel and coconama chocolate, with strawberries and some cream. My partner preferred this one.
I preferred the matcha panna cotta, and the coconama chocolate it came with was so good – like a Melty Kiss!
Since we came here on a special day (our actual wedding day 🥳!) they gave us another free dessert, the matcha panna cotta. So if you plan to celebrate a special occasion, it looks like they will gift a free dessert.
Final thoughts
Loewe’s rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
My rating for Takenaka Uni Bar hovers between 3-4 stars.
For the price of $168 for 2 people ($84 per person), I think the value is there. Most of the dishes were good and contained a lot of seafood like uni or ikura so if you really like uni or ikura, you will like this omakase.
There are certain small details I wish were different, like the sashimi choices and some of the elements in the seafood bowl. The clams and mussels were miss for me also due to the bland and salty broth.
But overall, it was a good meal and the seafood is fresh. We were quite full after our entire dinner. Presentation is good and service was great (as most Japanese places are). I would love to come back and check out their al le carte menu.
Sincerely, Loewe