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.