Thursday, June 4th - Mussel salad and Spicy Dubu

Night school. Second to last week. I'm a little relieved but I had also thought we'd be further along on the conversational pieces. I don't feel like we've had enough on the verbs either. Oh well. I guess I'll have to try hard to do some reading. Now that mid year planning is done, I might have some more mental freedom to do that. Hopefully.

I went to get Sushi on the way home. My favourite cheap place on Granville between Hemlecken and Davie. It's called... wait for it. "Excellent Sushi". It's a dive to look at and evertime that I've been there, there is a new waiter or waitress. The dude at the modest sushi bar is always the same but I'm always greeted by someone new. Strange. There are more 'cheap', run of the mill sushi places in downtown Vancouver than there are payphones. Seriously. A bento box mix of sushi of 18-20 pieces can run you from 6 - 10 bucks. The Excellent Sushi is 5. You might think, Ugh, that can't be good. You'd be wrong. This guy used to have a shop in Yaletown but he was forced out by rising rent and small space. He's had alot of the office workers in Yaletown follow him.

Now why would I say that, besides his Yaletown roots? Listen, I may live there but I ain't a Yaletown girl. As well, I never knew the dude while his restaurant was in Yaletown. I found him nearly three years ago when I saw his photocopied flyer in my gym. 5 bucks for 22 pieces? I'm there! At first, I thought it's just the same amount of sushi sliced thinner. It's not. You also get a nice bowl of miso soup and if you're taking out, they'll offer you some green tea while you wait. A good way to tell the average apart is how they handle the dynamite roll or yam roll. I do know that at the higher echelon of sushi, they way to tell the better from the best is the Egg/Omlette. That is the next level. But at the fat part of the bell curve where most of the sushi joints sit in Vancouver, it's the tempura. I've been to a couple that make a truck load of the tempura ebi at the start of the day and they get wilted and greasy. I've seen a few that the yam are cold and in a donut thick layer of batter. Not Excellent Sushi. I can hear the fryer going when I order a dynamite or yam roll. Also, the rice to filling ratio in many is ridiculously ricey.

I got the 5 dollar special and an extra Dynamite roll that was on 1.99 special. It was a lot of sushi but it was a craving I couldn't crack :-D. It was great.

Excellent Sushi Japanese Restaurant

1157 Granville Street

Vancouver

604-687-0038

So since I was so stuffed from lunch and D had meeting pizza we went light for dinner. I only got a small dubu salad and a mussel salad from TNT. I really like the TnT Supermarket ready made takeaway. Everything is fresh and I see them mark it down at the end of the day.