mindless ramblings

Esther and me went to Hapa Izakaya for dinner yesterday as part of her birthday festivities. Both of us have not been to a izakaya place in about a year, so we were both pretty excited about it. Parking was easy since we got there before the dinner rush (645 or so). We were seated right away at the bar, which was lucky as the crowd really started coming in after that.

Izakayas are definitely an interesting alternative to your regular Japanese sushi place. They are definitely noisy,  often dark and there is a bustle in the place that isn’t present in many sushi restaurants (except All You Can Eat places).

We decided to start off with 4 dishes initially, with foods from all the major food groups:

• seared mackerel
• agedashi tofu
• bacon wrapped enoki mushrooms
• kobe beef cutlet!

The mackerel arrived first. The fish is seared right in front of your eyes, leaving a slight char on the skin. The fish tasted fishy, but the accompanying condiment, which tasted like wasabi but was brown (?!) helped to neutralize the odour. The fish itself was fairly raw and tasted close to sashimi. Not too sure if it’s meant to be like that but I had no real complaints other than the fishiness.

Next to arrive was the bacon wrapped enoki mushrooms. These were absolutely delicious! The secret to eating these is to eat them whole. The first bite unleashes a torrent of flavour into your mouth. The mushrooms add a little chewiness to the whole thing and the sauce (just like takoyaki sauce) on the plate was a great addition too. We loved it! I really could see myself eating this all the time.

The agedashi tofu was nothing special. It’s hard to screw up fried tofu so it was just the usual stuff, although they did have some diced carrot thing on top which arrived cold, so it provided some coolness to the three pieces of steaming hot tofu. Not the most memorable dish but definitely not bad by any means too.

The last to arrive was the kobe beef cutlet. We thought it would be prepared in some other way, so we were surprised to see it deep fried like that. It was a weak dish for the both of us. There was barely any beef and it tasted like we were just eating the batter. We ended up trying to scoop up all the sauce since it was so tasteless. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you like eating $13.50 worth of batter.

With the first 4 dishes done, we weren’t exactly full so we had a look through the menu and chose 2 more dishes:

• bacon wrapped asparagus (too good to pass up)
• stone bowl rice thing

The bacon wrapped asparagus wasn’t as good as the enoki mushroom, although we gobbled it up before I remembered to take a picture! The mushroom version provides more crunch and the asparagus is too small to handle the piece of bacon. Still tasty though.

The stone bowl rice dish is another one that is “prepared” in front of you. They put all the ingredients (rice, chicken, garlic, tomatoes and some other stuff like egg which I didn’t want) in a hot bowl and bring it to your table still semi-raw. All the stuff is then mixed up by the waitress and left to cook in the bowl. This was pretty tasty, there was some spicy sauce in there and the garlic made for some serious garlic breath later on!

Pretty good meal overall, the total came up to $49 including $3 for tea (!) so it’s a little more expensive than Guu. Nevertheless, I’d recommend both of them, it’s a excellent alternative to the regular fare you find in town, especially if you are going with a whole gang of people.