Shima-Ya

Shima-Ya was highly recommended by one set of friends and not by another, so we decided to visit it ourselves.

Run by Japanese, I believe the restaurant only sits about 20 at full capacity. Needless to say, I saw the owner turn away a few customers and a few of them decided to order take out instead. While we were waiting, there were also many phone calls for take out.

As usual we started with a Tako Sashimi. I must say the chef is quite talented at running the place. Despite the volume of take out orders, he got our sashimi out quite quickly. The Tako was good. It had a good crunch to it, and was creamy without being slimy.

We noticed they have Battera sushi, so we decided to order the Saba since they don't have Shioyaki here and we wanted our saba fix.

Unfortunately, it did not blow me away. The ratio of rice to fish was not well balanced and so the flavour of the Saba was lost in the rice. I ended up halving the amount of rice in order to taste the Saba.

They had a few nigiri combos, so we ordered two deluxe combos, which comes with nine pieces of nigiri and a tuna roll. From left to right top: tuna, ika (squid), hamachi (yellow tail), saba (mackerel), salmon, and Hokkigai (clam). From left to right bottom: tamago (egg), ebi (shrimp), and ikura (salmon roe).

The fish was generally prepared well. The tuna was very creamy and the ika texture was one of the better prepared ones I've had in a while. The hamachi was kind of bland, but the Saba was as expected: oily, salty and fishy in a very good way. The salmon was solid, but the Hokkigai was quite tough. I wanted to like it because it was the first time I've seen it sliced into a pocket to hold the rice, but it was just too tough. The tamago was surprisingly pleasant- I'm usually not a fan. The shrimp was sweet and crunchy. As far as shrimp goes, it was quite good. The ikura, though pleasant (not fishy), was not salty enough. The tuna rolls were fine.

Overall we enjoyed the food put out in front of us. The food was worth the price. However, I was a bit disappointed in the ratio of rice to fish in both the Battera and the nigiri. For the nigiri, I basically just kept eating half the amount of rice. The amount of wasabi spread onto the nigiri was quite good though.

We don't think we will return simply because we had a really great experience at Isami, who also had much better prices.