No. 66, Fumin Rd, Zuoying Dist
高雄市左營區富民路66號
(07)558-2208
Monday-Sunday
11:30am-2:00pm
5:30pm-9:00pm
English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 400-500NTD
In Taiwan, you need only prefix a food group with the word "creative" and you can charge hundreds more for it. Sushi in particular. I only found out that this restaurant was creative after I got the bill... In retrospect, I dunno. I guess the plates had cool shapes.
Please forgive this horrible photograph taken in haste. It is actually a very beautiful restaurant, inside and out(side). Super Japanese, super elegant, all that stuff.
The atmosphere was only less-than-perfect because there were so many PEOPLE eating there. Having fancy sushi for lunch on a Monday. I don't get it, but it happened. So pay attention to that phone number up there; you really should call ahead and reserve a table.
Their menu has like a billion pages, so I just photographed a part of it. Their selections vary based on the day/season though, which means you'll probably run into a lot of things on the menu that you can't actually order (and vice-versa). On this page, at least, the "in-season" sushi has been marked with a red check.
For vegetarians, they have a 445NTD set meal that I would have been ALL OVER if I were ordering just for myself. Instead we ordered pretty much everything else. So. Let us commence!
Here we have tempura giant shrimp and sweet potato. They were really well tempura'd: crispy, and not too oily. PLUS, the sweet potato was by far the best sweet potato I've eaten in Taiwan so far. (Where oh where did they get it?!?) The powders on the side are some sort of spicy thing (red) and some sort of salty thing (green). I thought the waiter said the green stuff was powdered wasabi but I must have misunderstood... They were both good though, and pretty... creative?!?
This sushi roll was so neat! That in the middle there is tempura soft-shelled crab, soft enough for you to eat it whole.
--In the middle of writing that I realized soft-shelled crab is not the magical rare thing I thought it was... It sounded so incredible when my friend told me about it in Chinese. Ummm. The sushi was good though. I sort of wished it came with wasabi and soy sauce, instead of whatever that was at the bottom (no real flavor), but that's okay. The table had vinegar available.
OMGGG just LOOK at this masterpiece! As soon as I saw it in the menu I knew we had to order it. It's basically a bunch of raw fish piled onto some rice. That in the middle there is egg, and there's also scallions and ginger piled on the side as well. If you choose you can mix it all up to get...
...this! I really liked this dish, because it basically allowed me to stuff my face with spoonful after spoonful of sushimash. The fish was perhaps not as high-quality as the fish one would get atop of piece of actual sushi, and the flavor was a bit bland without wasabi or soy sauce, but I still really liked it. Raw fish nom nom nom.
Hand-rolls! These were so cute. They had lots of neon orange roe, a little bit of rice, and some mysterious thick white substance at the bottom that I was not expecting whatsoever and dripped all over my lap.
That soup below is the vegetarian miso, and it was awesome! There were tons and tons of vegetables and mushrooms in it, and it had a heavy vegetably, carroty-sweet flavor. Like.
Today's only incidence of real sushi! I don't remember what fish it was, but it was good! The wasabi was real, too--REALLL painful. Amazing.
Hidden in the back of this picture is our complimentary starter: a bowl of sliced onions in a vinegary sauce with seasame seeds on top. Not cooked onions, mind you. It was very refreshing &etc, but tasted like eating raw onions.
We tried to order yellowfish but they were out, so we got whitefish instead. It looked like this, with a little pile of MSG peppersalt off to the side. When it first appeared at our table I was like "aight" but when I took a bite I almost died. OMG, it was INCREDIBLE! Juicy, salty, MSGy, excellent. I think it was the most delicious thing in this entire meal.
Our final dish was tamagoyaki sushi, which tasted like a perfectly smooth, juicy and chewy, slightly sweet omlette with layers that fell apart in my mouth. I'm not sure how I feel about slightly sweet egg, but the preparation was exquisite. And just look at that leaf. Creative.
We also got a complimentary dessert, a cute little cup of sweet bean soup. It was slightly sweet and quite tasty. I was absolutely stuffed by this point (funny that never happens at sushi restaurants...) but I still finished it in like a minute.
Some final notes: the service was great. They even have a service bell, as well as this educational and entertaining guide on how to properly eat sushi. The waiters came by frequently to refill our 麥茶 tea, which was delicious.
Yilang Creative Sushi is of couse super expensive, so I won't be going here every day for lunch or anything. Even so, it was a really nice treat!
OVERALL REVIEW: 4/5
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