Oishii Village

Oishii Village is where Restaurant Indonesia was for many years on the east side of 14 St just north of 17th Ave SW. Their awning has been up for weeks but it didn’t officially open until a couple of weeks ago, and I went there for lunch today.

The interior has been fairly nicely spruced up in light neutral colours, no more of the pinks and pastels of Indonesia, and tables are a big improvement with no more of those uncomfortable captain’s chairs. It looks like there is still a bit of work to be done since there is a sort of “office” in the front that doesn’t appear finished, but otherwise, it’s a nice reno for a room that always had great potential. It’s a good-sized space. I wanted to sit as is my usual wont at the sushi bar, but there are only three seats and it doesn’t look comfortable, so I sat at a small window-side table with my newspaper. Now, it was about 11C and overcast out, so one of my first tasks was to ask them to turn down the AC. It was freezing- but if you want a place with AC, it’s abundant here.

The menu covers lots of bases with a larger than average number of small-plate, tempura, noodle, and donburi offerings, but I ordered sushi. I ordered inari and one each among spicy tuna, unagi and avocado, and yam tempura maki. They arrived about 10 minutes later and after some encouraging “cooking” sounds and aromas- I was hoping for freshly deep-fried yam and warm grilled unagi.

The sushi was pretty good. Inari (I ordered two at $1.30 each) were smaller than the ones you see at supermarkets but that’s because they weren’t stuffed with lots of rice, which I appreciated actually. The rolls were all nicely formed- a little too nicely, as they were rolled so tightly that the rice was a bit “cemented” for my liking; not glued together but dense, which makes the “melt in your mouth” experience pretty impossible- and, size-wise, they’re more in the smaller “traditional” form factor than LA style monsters you find at Towa and, to a lesser extent, Globefish. They’re not expensive, about $5 each.

I can’t disparage a thing with respect to taste or freshness. The yam tempura was very good, with the same sort of fried yam “chips” that you can enjoy at Uptown Sushi. Spicy tuna were dolloped with a lovely SPICY sauce that my server said was “homemade,” and it had not a drop of mayo. I’m a little unhappy with their inclusion of sprouts in that roll, but it’s not like at Kyoto 17, where the roll is half sprout; the tuna was the star and it was quite good, fresh tasting and as I say the sauce was great. The only miss for me was the unagi roll, and this is just because I always prefer unagi as nigiri or in a donburi. I don’t care for tiny little pieces of it, but I wasn’t sure how small the maki would be.

The bill for 3 decent sized, well-prepared rolls and two inari sushi pieces (just water to drink) was a few cents north of $20, which is not too bad. Not the best deal in town, but I am cautiously optimistic and give this place a tentative thumbs up. Service was excellent, the sushi was more than passable, and for me it could hardly be more convenient as it’s barely two blocks from my house.