Bon Sushi

Bon Sushi

C13 – 201 Portage Avenue (the former TD Building at Portage & Main)

204-957-1159

Take out sushi lines the corridors wherever you go and most of it has made a mockery of what sushi is supposed to be.  Sushi from a sit-down restaurant is always better than sushi from a takeout container.

Almost always.

Greenish is one of my favourite sushi places in the city and they have an off sale component.  That’s not really fair though since a large component of their business exists in the dining room.  So again I state:  sushi from a sit-down restaurant is always better than sushi from a takeout container.

Most of the time.

Since the proliferation of the now ubiquitous sushi restaurant, the number of sit-down establishments that serve mediocre (or sometimes poor) sushi continues to grow.  Hand-in-hand, the availability of the takeout container grows at the same exponential rate.  The quality of the takeout varies greatly as well, and sadly, poor fast food sushi grows as quickly as seaweed.  At the bottom of the scale, the takeout from Safeway is barely edible, complete with dried out, hardened rice and freezer burnt, paper thin raw fish.  Stores that have cooks on staff are usually better as they make it fresh.  As you know though, much of it sits all day and that’s not how sushi is meant to be consumed.  That’s fundamentally why takeout and sushi don’t merge very well.  Among all the bad takeout sushi, I’m glad to report a takeout place serves fresh, quality food that tastes excellent, rivalling many sit-down restaurants.

Bon Sushi is a tiny, portable counter that appears at the concourse on the main floor of the 201 Portage Avenue Tower.  It sits at the top of the dual escalators, perfectly poised to intercept customers coming and going anywhere within the building. 

With generous portions, fresh food, reasonable prices, good tastes and friendly service, there’s a lot to like about this stand.  Here’s an overview of what lunch looks like for me today:

The ginger and wasabi do not come in the container so you’re free to order as much as you need—and they’re happy to deliver.   The same goes with the soy so don't be afraid to ask if the usual single packet is barely enough to cover your bowl. 

You can see the bright colours here, depicting the freshness and the size of the pieces.  The Spicy Crab Roll comes jammed with crab, lightly spiced with hot sauce, and wrapped in a thin layer of soft and moist rice.  The blending of the masago (fish eggs) gives a hint a salt to go with the spicy zip.  Although titled spicy, it’s not that hot and should be approachable to most audiences. 

I’m normally not a huge fan of sushi shrimps.  I’ve only had raw shrimp once (at one of the greatest sushi houses in the world) and the rest of the time, it’s cooked.  The normal cooking process for sushi shrimp is a simple steam, leaving the shrimp overcooked, rubbery and worst of all, flavourless.  Here, Bon Sushi coarse chops the shrimp (ebi), blends it with raw scallops and dubs it the Ebikaze Roll.  This roll is pure genus.  The crunch of the shrimp couples perfectly with the taste, body and substance of the scallops.  Add some crunch from the tempura and the zest from the hot sauce and you’ve got one of the best tasting rolls I’ve ever experienced.  I’m already pondering ways to plagiarise this wonderful creation.  If I have one complaint about this dish, it’s that the tempura crumbs aren’t as crunchy as they can be. 

The nigiri pieces come hefty and very filling.  There’s too much rice for my liking but at least there’s a big hunk of fish to go with the rice.  The light tuna melts in your mouth and tastes fresh from the sea.  The red tuna doesn’t taste quite as fresh but it’s far from reaching its shelf life.  The salmon is the best of the three fishes, tasting velvety, soft and fatty (in the good way).

If you’re anything like me, sushi itself is a great genre of food but raw fish is where it’s at.  I can never get enough salmon and for those occasions, Bon Sushi serves trays of Salmon Lover, loaded with spicy salmon rolls (covered in tempura), a roll of cucumber with avocado, covered with salmon, and two generous pieces of nigiri.  All the fish taste fresh and tender and if you love salmon as much as I love salmon, this dish goes right up your alley at a very reasonable price. 

Sit down Japanese restaurants always taste better than to-go counters?  Most of the time—but not true here.  Bon Sushi is a wonderful place to grab a sushi lunch when you’re on the go and you need to eat at your desk, or anywhere for that matter.  I love bringing this back to the office and making the schmos at work drool while munching on their canned tuna samiches!

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