Servers are harried, but food is fresh and tasty
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Another busy night at Sushi Garden in Burnaby with assorted sashimi, sushi and rainbow rolls served up on wooden plates. Photograph by : Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun
SUSHI GARDEN
JAPANESE GARDEN
4635 Kingsway, Burnaby; 604-436-0104.
It’s not a super-sleuth’s method of sussing out a good place to eat, but lineups out a restaurant door grab my attention.
It’s either a case of lots of food, cheap or of good food, cheap.
Sushi Garden, on Kingsway in Burnaby, is the latter.
As we drove by, the entrance to the restaurant was buzzing like a hornet’s nest and here it was,
2 p.m, supposedly past the lunch-hour rush. I was famished and it seemed like reason enough to double back.
I found that one must not go expecting great service or even a distracted “Irashaiii!!!” There is confusion at the door and the harried servers have little time for niceties and I can, without reservation, call one a frowning, young grump.
Once we were seated, however, our server was sweeter, had time to smile and impart more warmth and welcome.
By the food on tables, I could see the sushi was well made and had that glint of freshness, and so I became even more hungry.
Obviously, the food and the prices are worth the lacklustre service because people politely waited.
To give an idea of what you’d spend, maki sushi rolls are mostly around $4 and combination meals are around $8. You can order a nine-piece salmon sashimi dish, for example, for $8. Apparently, lineups are even longer for dinner.
We had some sushi that was, as we anticipated, fresh, although some of the larger maki sushi could have been rolled a little more snugly. Tako (octopus) sunomono, often tough and unpleasant, was tender and tasty. It was lunch and we couldn’t eat a lot, but judging by food on tables around us, the sashimi glistened and the tempura batter looked crisply delicate.
The restaurant is open daily for lunch and dinner.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
