BlüFish

BlüFish
179 Bannatyne Ave
204-779-9888
sushi@blufish.ca
http://www.blufish.ca/

March, 2009

The Exchange District features a fair number of varying restaurants, but the area desperately missed the presence of Japanese dining. BlüFish fills the void nicely by bringing in well-made sushi offerings. Sharing an entranceway with the Moda-fina hair studio, you can easily walk by its entrance unknowingly.

BlüFish only seats about 30 people so I highly recommend that you make reservations for a quick lunch or dining before a show. Walk into BlüFish and you enter into a chic world of neo modern décor, aptly complemented by urban new-age music. The bold colours, the black tables and the square black plates leads you to believe that you’ll dine with adventurous and exciting foods.

If you’re a fan of sushi, you always find fish exciting but BlüFish doesn’t take you very far into adventurousness. BlüFish’s special rolls include the Blü Ocean [scallop, hokkigai (surf clam), shrimp and cucumber], the Exchange (cucumber, avocado topped with salmon and tuna), and the BlüFish [crab meat, tamago (egg), ebi (cooked shrimp), hokkigai, vegetables, avocado and tobiko (fish eggs)]. None of the signature rolls look notably inviting, with the BlüFish roll appearing to be a haphazard mishmash of incompatible ingredients. I stick with the common dishes that you find at every Japanese restaurant.

As a gauge to test a Japanese restaurant’s dedication to quality, I always order the California roll. A quick look at the California roll and I can tell you right away whether the restaurant wants to serve you the best ingredients available, acceptable ingredients or cut-corner ingredients. Most Japanese restaurants make California rolls with crab, avocado and tobiko, accented by mayonnaise. If your California roll has pollack instead of crab, you might want to think twice about how fresh the raw fish is. If your California roll has lump crab meat, you can prepare for the freshest and tastiest fish on the market; I have yet to find lump crab meat in a California roll in Winnipeg. Most self-respecting Japanese restaurants will use broken crab meat in the California rolls—as does BlüFish. First test passed.
Even with a fairly generous dollop of crab, the California rolls tastes surprisingly bland. A touch more mayo would have made the roll fuller and a more generous slice of avocado would give the roll more richness and substance. The uninspired California roll leaves me suspicious about the rest of the meal.

As a rule, I find all of BlüFish’s rolls insipidly bland. The shitake maki features sweet shitake with sesame seeds but the roll as a package has little depth as you taste nothing beyond the mushrooms. A greater mix of sesame seeds would add another dimension to the roll. The Philadelphia roll comes with cucumber, cream cheese and smoked salmon. Smoked salmon with cream cheese is a classic combination but BlüFish overuses the cheese and skimps on the salmon; you end up tasting too much of the cheese and not enough of the fish (which is what most sushi eaters want). A sliver of cucumber would add a nice texture contrast to the dish but the oversized slice imparted a cucumber taste that gets in the way of the salmon-cheese combination. The dynamite roll (tempura shrimp, mayo, avocado and tobiko) is the best of the rolls we sampled, although again, there's nothing outstanding about this dish. As a generalisation, I notice that BlüFish overuses the cucumber ingredient. For rolls with cucumber, the cucumber imparts a contrasting texture to the roll, without affecting the nature of its taste. For every roll, the oversized cucumber component imparts a dominating flavour, which masks the other flavours of the roll. Simply cutting back on the cucumber and increasing the mayo will improve BlüFish’s rolls immensely.

While BlüFish’s rolls taste pedestrian, I have high hopes for the nigiri (pieces of fish on rice) as BlüFish is very generous with their portion sizes. Many sushi restaurants skimp on the portions of fish and boost the portions of their rice in the nigiri (for obvious reasons). The hokkigai nigiri tastes crunchy and rich—very nice, although I’ve yet to encounter a sushi restaurant that mis-prepares hokkigai. Hamachi (yellowtail tuna) is a different story though as this is one of the most finicky selections available. Unless the hamachi is absolutely fresh, it will smell and taste disturbingly fishy. BlüFish passes this critical test. The sake (salmon) nigiri tastes equally pleasant—short of outstanding but more than adequate. The unagi (freshwater eel) always comes cooked and often in a barbecue sauce. BlüFish’s unagi tastes bland and flavourless; the barbecue sauce, while evident on the fish, is tasteless and virtually non-existent. The could well be the worst unagi I ever tasted.

With every sushi meal, I like to order one (at least) serving of sashimi. Fish in the sashimi form forgoes all of the accompaniments and comes sliced into bite-sized pieces. The amount varies between restaurants; I experienced as little as three pieces of fish and as much as a half pound. For the sashimi, I order one of my favourite fishes—toro, or fatty tuna. The toro comes from the underside of the tuna (usually bluefin) where the meat is much fatter in content than the rest of the fish. The toro further breaks into two categories of fatness but I have not yet encountered a restaurant in Winnipeg that sets the two apart. The leaner of the toro (chutoro) comes as a solid, whitish, milky coloured meat with a pinkish tinge. The fattier of the toro (otoro) appears flaky and segmented, ready to fall apart and melt in your mouth. The sashimi from BlüFish features six strips, three of which comes from the chutoro section and three from the otoro section. Both taste exquisite. Bravo.

Although BlüFish has some problems with its food preparation and proportions, I have no doubt that this restaurant only seeks the freshest of ingredients. The beautiful fish forces the diner to quickly to forget that the rolls are less than perfect. BlüFish does not crack the top tier of Winnipeg’s great sushi houses but it is a competent and acceptable place to come for a pleasing round of Japanese foods—stick with the fish and you’ll be happier for it. Isn’t that the best part of sushi anyway?

*** /5


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