Food
Pain and (Some) Pleasure: Odaki Sushi
You know a meal is not boding well when you and your dinner mates wonder if “affront” is spelled with one “f” or two (i.e. this food is an affront to my taste buds). But this was the exact discussion that took place on a recent visit to Odaki Sushi, an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant on St-Laurent Boulevard. Yes, I realize all-you-can-eat joined with sushi should clue one in on the quality…but for a price tag of $26.99/person and with previous, fairly positive, experiences at other sushi buffets, I figured Odaki had to be at least acceptable. But mostly, we were affronted.
To be fair, Odaki had some things going for it in the beginning. The selection of items on the menu is plentiful enough, ranging from sashimi to maki to soups to entrees. We started the meal with some wakame salads, shrimp tempura and miso soup. The food arrived very quickly, which was both appreciated and a bit worrisome – it takes four minutes to prepare shrimp tempura? However, the tempura was quite good, light and crunchy. The miso soup was also nice and a great way to open the meal. Not so nice was the wakame salad; it was slightly soggy and very bland.
But why waste time and stomach space on soup and salad at a sushi restaurant? Time for the fish! Our first order included lots of sashimi – octopus, mackerel, and some white and red tuna. Also selected were spider rolls and some with eel, along with a couple of avocado ones for good balance. I enjoyed both the spider rolls and the mackerel, but found the octopus chewy, and the sauce drizzled all over the red tuna far too sweet and too much.
But it was the second round that did us in. Taking a little break from fish, we ordered the sweet corn and cheese roll, an imperial-style roll filled not with corn, or even cheese, unless you call a Velveeta-like substance “cheese.” Oily, packed with this runny “cheese” and sticks of what tasted like pressed ham, this roll was horrendous.
Along with it came a seafood udon noodle dish, which consisted of pasty noodles, tiny scallops and, the main ingredient, salt. This dish was tasted, pushed aside, and never looked at again, except to complain about it to the waitress at the end of the meal. Also pushed aside were the flying fish roe sashimi, the only taste again being salt. Finally, the Kobe beef maki did not end the meal on a bright note.
I am not terribly difficult to please when it comes to sushi. On occasion, I have even enjoyed grocery store sushi for a quick lunch. While some of Odaki’s offerings were decent, and some were even good, they weren’t worth $26.99 (or $21.99 if it’s a weekday visit). The place is often full, and the people around us eating seemed to be enjoying their food, but I’ll take the grocery store over Odaki, please.
Odaki Sushi
3977, blvd. St-Laurent
(514) 282-1268
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When: August 2008
1st: The ambiance
This restaurant is quite nicely done up in the main eating area. The furniture is new in the last couple months and there are 2 nice separate seating arrangements for smaller groups. The décor is well done and Asiatic but why they feel the need to play 80’s American top 40 instead of something more ethnic is beyond me. Why go through the effort to make it look regional then play the backstreet boys?
The bathroom is atrocious. Filthy. Ring around the toilet indicates has not been cleaned in at least a month. Degree of water splashes on the mirror indicates the same. Drain cover on the floor is missing. Floor is gross. I would not expect this in a restaurant charging $27 per person.
In order to get too the bathroom you have to pass a curtain through a hallway lined with freezers. Ok, space is tight in Montréal restaurants so I will forgive them the freezers but the curtain you have to pass through is filthy. You can see the stains from thousands of hands pushing the curtain aside to pass. The same hands that are delivering my food! I don’t get it. If my curtains in my house were obviously dirty from across the room I would clean them before inviting guests over. But here the manager, owner, employees thinks nothing of it?
Finally the food.
What a disappointment. I’m from Vancouver so I know good sushi. In the beginning the sushi was good. Not quite to the level of Vancouver but not bad and certainly a good enough quality for an all-you-can-eat place.
Now the quality has really declined. Instead of raising prices, the owner has obviously decided to lower quality. In the beginning there was sashimi, real crab, baked oysters but now all gone. All that is left is the basics and even those are poorly done. The sushi rice was dry and flavorless, obviously no Japanese vinegar was used in the preparation. Each roll tasted exactly the same as the other and tasted “offâ€Â, like the day old rolls from the fast food sushi places. The rolls were also not identifiable! Who has heard of California rolls with omelet? Other rolls had ingredients that were equally screwed up. And any roll that called for tempura had a huge amount of gross tasting powdered tempura. The kitchen dishes were all very “Chinese†tasting, eg. heavy and greasy, not Japanese.
All in all my wife and I were hugely disappointed. More so to realize that we had lost our Montreal sushi place and now need to find another.
It’s always sad to see a place that you love go downhill. I predict that unless they return to their old quality this place should be out of business in a year. There is no way it should be alive giving the fantastic options we have in Montreal.
I was so disappointed this is actually the first review I have ever written and will be posting it at the usual montreal review places to warn others.