Y uzu? Y not.

Another great 8-course omakase dinner at Yuzu. This time, the meal was $65. With only 1 'repeat' dish, that's 23 different dishes I've had at 3 seatings. To be fair though, every dinner has 1 sashimi and 1 sushi plate though the fish have varied.

1. Smoked salmon rolled into small flowers on a bed of greens with mango chips. Delicious salmon and not too smoky. The greens were fragrant. I couldn't taste much mango flavour but the oily crunch had great mouth feel.
2. 4 amuse-bouches. 2 marinated daikon shell stuffed with flaky hamachi: a nice contrast. A finger-length full fish grilled with lightly spiced sauce and coarse sea salt: gone in 2 bites, even the head. A gelatinous cube of beef marrow stuffed with sesame seed: good but doesn't quite have the nice marrow taste of the pig marrow I had last time. Asparagus in a sesame sauce: fresh with a nice crunch.
3. A clear soup filled with tiny coloured starch balls like candy, lily bulbs, and a fish coated with small, brown, puffy toasted rice (almost like rice krispies). Interesting texture. The standout, though, was the tofu. Bruce called it ?goma tofu? but a quick search shows that to be tofu made from sesame. I certainly didn't taste any sesame. The tofu was slightly hard, had a spongy texture (the cross section contained many small holes like a tiny sponge cake), and a slight sweetness. Quite remarkable.
4. The sashimi dish contained 4 sea dishes. One was cousin to the hamachi. Sea bream with slightly seared skin, the skin was separated, seared, and placed as a topping. Shrimp on a bed of seaweed. Must be different from regular shrimp at cheaper sushi because it was sweet and buttery. Even the meat inside shrimp head was less slimy and had a nice pâté crumbly coarseness.
5. The only repeat: grilled black cod with enoki and shiitake mushrooms. A sauce made from miso and grounded up peppery japanese leaf provided a nice green base.
6. Sea bream on seaweed simmered in sake. Little enoki mushrooms and tiny asparagus stuffed in little bowls carved from daikon completed the dish. The dipping sauce was a ponzu sauce with spicy condiment. Very tender fish. And you can smell and taste a bit of the sake. Fun fact: Sea bream is incredibly white when it's cooked.
   
7. The sushi dish: some fish, hana?, 3 pieces of a squid ring stuffed with rice (kind of like a reverse maki). The standout was the BC tuna brushed with garlic oil and topped with saute green onion. This combination was so outstanding I actually closed my eyes to savour every bite.
8. A green tea egg flan? The caramelized sugar sheet coating the top breaks up nicely to reveal a slightly sweet green tea soft pudding-like interior with a definite eggy taste. The icing sugar-coated strawberries and blueberries side was a nice touch.

Note: Bruce mentioned that this Friday there is a 'different' omakase dinner. I'm not quite sure if he means that he is changing up the menu or that there will be special dishes because of shipment of rare ingredients. He mentions ayu, a fresh-water fish. He invites me to come back ... but I don't know, 2 omakase dinners in 1 week, these dinners aren't exactly cheap.

Note the second: There was recent expose in the Toronto Star about restaurants passing off frozen tilapia as red snapper. I thought Yuzu came off fine as their 'Japanese snapper' was tested and found to be, correctly, red seabream. However, Bruce felt that there was still some misunderstanding as the survey implied that he was passing off 'red seabream' as 'red snapper' since the article says some restaurants listed snapper but had seabream. In fact, Bruce states that red seabream is a better fish than red snapper (It was actually noted in the article's sidebar that: Red Snapper - saltwater fish. Red Seabream - pricey saltwater fish). This is particularly true in North America where red snapper typically comes from the warm waters of Florida.

Star Wreck

Overheard in a Hollywood studio. SPOILERS ALERT.








Good Abrams: This reboot will be awesome. We'll create a tight script, devoid of common Trek plot holes, interesting characters, and lots of surprises. Hey, maybe even the death of some well-loved main characters to shake things up!

Evil Abrams: I hear what you're saying. But what I'm thinking is ... all the characters stay the same, more or less, and they'll say their iconic lines like 'Dammit Jim ...'. That's a classic, can't leave that out. Lots of stuff blowing up and lens flare, oh so much lens flare.

GA: Umm ... ok. Well, the easiest way to ignore the Trek canon is to simply set our movie in a different Trek universe. We know from 'Mirror, Mirror' and lots of other trek episodes that there are plenty of those.

EA: Two words: time travel. The time-line has been changed by an enemy from the future.

GA: Seriously? Time travel is like 'It was all a dream'. It's usually a big middle finger to the audience.

EA: You're too glum. Eat less prunes. An unknown supernova threatens the Romulans with destruction of their homeworld from a massive blast ...

GA: But to be that close to a star to suffer physical damage ... and not even a monitoring station. I mean, even on Earth we have earth-quake and volcano monitors. Are the Romulans descended from Republicans?

EA: Ha! Nice one. Seriously, kaboom! Spock was too late to save them with the Red Matter. A lone Romulan mining vessel remains, blasted into the past, with a motley crew and a vengeful captain. He is bent on destroying the Federation for the future death of his beloved wife.

GA: Hmm. Once in the past, Nero captures future Spock. He realizes: "save the Vulcan, save the future". Using time dilation effect from navigating his ship at relativistic speed, he returns to the future in the "blink of an eye", ship-time. He saves Romulus with the Red Matter. His only dilemma: let his future self be with his wife, or kill him and take his place.

EA: Too cerebral. Anyway, that leaves no room for the Kirk and the Gang.

GA: You're the one who wanted time travel. I'm just trying to think up the most logical course of action.

EA: What are you, Sarek? No, Nero kills George Kirk and blows up Vulcan. The Federation scrambles and sends cadets and booters from the Academy to meet this threat.

GA: Uh ... cadets and booters? Who've never even served on a starship? Where's everyone else?

EA: They're away on an emergency.

GA: The Federation is so short-staffed that they assign rookies to starships when there's 2 emergencies?!

EA: Don't worry. They'll all get blown to smithereens.

GA: I ... see. A whole fleet of red shirts.

EA: Bingo. Hot-headed James T. Kirk meets future Spock, who tells him it's his destiny to captain the Enterprise.

GA: But ... it's a different time-line. How can Spock know what's going to happen> Maybe he'll become Evil Kirk or Self-Destructive Douchebag Kirk.

EA: You're such a downer. Earth is threatened with destruction ...

GA: Let me guess. In a universe filled with nasty Klingons, Federation Earth has no planetary defences: no in-system ships, no space stations, earth-based missiles, not even a couple of sub-orbital crafts.

EA: We're spending our budgets on lens flare. Anyway, Kirk saves the day and blows away Nero ... after, of course, a bon mot or two. Hasta la vista, baby!

GA: Wait a minute ... hold on a sec. A trained military officer ignores war conventions and makes no effort to apprehend a war criminal. I mean, blowing up Vulcan, Nero's killed more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined. Don't the remaining Vulcans want some closure by putting this Nero guy on trial? Ok ... at least give Kirk a court martial for his rash actions, right?

EA: No freaking way. It's James Tiberius Kirk, bitch! He becomes captain of the Enterprise for his courage.

GA: Gahhhhh! But he hasn't even spent any time on a ship. Even the bravest war heroes only get a Medal of Honor. They don't get promoted several ranks. What kind of reboot is this?

EA: Lens flare! ... And scene.

Inconclusive Finding

The second movie that I saw was The Experimental Eskimos. The 3 points of this documentary was that:

1. The Canadian goverment in the 60s ran a social experiment to see if Inuits can be fully assimilated into 'white' culture by sending 3 Inuit boys for schooling in Ottawa.
2. The experiment was a failure in that the boys were not assimilated. Moreover, the skills they acquired enabled them to become leaders fighting for Aboriginal rights.
3. But the personal cost to them eventually led to the un-ravelling of their professional and personal lives.

Though I have sympathies for the 3 men in this movie, Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak, and Eric Tagoona, I did not agree whole-hearted with this film's conclusions:

1. There was no corroborating evidence of this social 'experiment', as the narrator kept intoning in a ominous manner, outside of a few memos. Ignoring the racist and colonialist language of the time, it did not sound like official government policy. The 3 boys seemed to have been caught in some bureaucratic project, but the attempt to conflate their experience with the residential school scandal is misleading.
2. I agree that their education, though forced upon them, was better than anything they would have received up North. This enabled them to use it to fight for Native rights.
3. But the cost during their teenage years (e.g., estrangement from their family and culture, exposure to racist statements) was a necessary but not sufficient reason for their 'downfall'. The men admitted that there were other reasons for their professional failures as well as personal problems. That is, if everything had continued successfully for them, this experience would not have really affected their lives. Conversely, it may have been the final straw, but there were other reasons that culminated in their recent personal crises.