Located at 193 Carlton St in Toronto

For Jessica’s birthday, we went to Zakkushi, which is an authentic Japanese izakaya in Cabbagetown (you can get there easily on the College streetcar going east).  It’s a really nicely decorated restaurant that is cozy and separated by wooden panels (at least the area that we were seated at).  All of the staff spoke Japanese and our server was so warm and friendly throughout our entire stay there.  

We started off with drinks.  I got the lychee and grapefruit cocktail.  Only the first sip had a lychee flavour to it.  The rest of the drink was overpowered by the ice.

We ordered so many tapas to share that night.  I’ll post all the ones we had and talk about each one.

My favourites were definitely the beef tongue, takowasabi (always my fav!), and meatball.

I would definitely come again to this restaurant for tapas!  I loved the environment. 🙂

Such a sweet gesture by the restaurant!

I especially loved the end when they played a happy birthday song over the speakers and came out with candles and sparklers on Jessica’s dessert and say happy birthday to her.  Our server also snapped a picture of our group with a Polaroid and stuck it into a card for us all to sign as a gift to Jessica.  That’s the sweetest and most thoughtful thing I’ve seen a restaurant do free of charge.  I absolutely loved it. 🙂

In terms of desserts, we all tried the dessert where two pieces of pancakes were sandwiched between green tea ice cream.  This was my first time having something like this!  🙂  I liked how strong the green tea ice cream was.  Edith and I also shared the mochi ice cream.  To my surprise, it wasn’t the same mochi ice cream as I had had recently at Aoyama where ice cream was inside a piece of mochi.  For this, there were four big and chewy mochi pieces and vanilla ice cream on the side.

I tried a bite of the sesame ice cream and was blown away with how sesame it tasted.  It was so good! 😀

Yay for izakayas!

All in all, Zakkushi is definitely a worthy izakaya to visit! 🙂