Located at 5516 Lawrence Avenue East in Toronto

My friend Juliana was able to connect me to her friend Marina (who we’ve actually met before 3 years ago) who connected us with her friend Pearl who is connected with the restaurant called Azumi in Port Union (see how associations lead one to another?) 🙂 .  It is a Japanese restaurant that serves sushi, bento box, and typical Japanese fare.  They also used to serve teppanyaki as well but because their chef relocated, they had to shut down the teppanyaki part of their restaurant.

Natsu Combo (with chicken teriyaki). $11.99
-dumplings (2 pcs), California roll (3 pcs), shrimp & vegetable tempura, mixed vegetables with chicken teriyaki

It was on a Friday night that we arrived and Marina suggested that we start off with bento boxes and then order more food afterwards.  I didn’t want to spend too much of my stomach space on bento box food since we were going to order more afterwards so I chose the Natsu bento box which contained gyoza, teriyaki chicken, rice, shrimp tempura and vegetable tempura, and also 3 California rolls.  It also arrived with a salad and soup.  The salad was full of crunchy lettuce leaves and not very flavourful.  The soup was also average miso soup.

While the general presentation of the bento box wasn’t very impressive, I was actually very impressed and surprised at how delicious the shrimp tempura and vegetable tempura were.  The shrimp was fitted around very crunchy tempura batter and had a slight delicious factor in it.  The same went for the vegetable tempura.  It was very good!

The teriyaki chicken was so-so and a little rough and not smooth enough for my taste.  The fat on the chicken was filmsy and limp.  I barely touched the rice; it wasn’t authentic Japanese rice either.  The gyoza was okay-tasting.  The California roll was also okay-tasting.

Grilled Salmon

Time for the better dishes!  We ordered a side of grilled salmon since Juliana wanted to try the fish.  It was doused in teriyaki sauce and the grilled salmon was all right.  It wasn’t completely amazing but also wasn’t completely dissatisfying.

Since we had special connection with the chef and owner of the restaurant through Pearl, we got a special roll delivered to our table.  It was the Rainbow Cheese Roll!  It’s called a rainbow because it’s topped with different types of sashimi on top and then covered with cheese.

Rainbow Cheese Roll

I liked the size of the rolls.  They weren’t too big to fit into the mouth in one bite.  The rice could have been a little more soft but at least the flavour of the fish was good.  The cheese on top wasn’t very strong though so the roll wasn’t entirely memorable either.  It was pretty to look at though!

Crème brûlée

Last but not least, we were presented with two desserts.  Thank you so much! 🙂  The first one was a single bowl of crème brûlée that we all shared.  The crispy glazed surface on the top was thin and the entire cream part was smooth but not particularly amazing.

The second dessert that we had was the ice cream crepe with mango and green tea inside.  I’ve never had an ice cream crepe that was doubled flavoured and wrapped in a crepe and cut apart like a snake.  It was definitely unique!  The taste and flavor of the crepe was very different than most crepes.  It was a little grainy and hard and not as soft as most crepes.  The ice cream wasn’t very distinguishable in the crepe either.

Green Tea & Mango Ice Cream Crepe

All in all, we had a very good time chit-chatting and enjoying the variety of food that we had.  I can’t complain.  However, I do hold my opinions close to myself that the food was very mediocre and that the only thing I liked was the tempura.  This restaurant is a lot more east than I usually venture out to so I was also thankful that I got to try a restaurant in this area.  Thank you for having us, Azumi! 🙂