Le Café Michi
1802 Pharmacy Ave. (South west corner of Pharmacy and Sheppard Ave.)
Scarborough, Ontario
This little unassuming restaurant in a small strip plaza on the south west corner of Pharmacy and Sheppard Ave. can easily go unnoticed if one were not intentionally looking for it.
With a quiet white banner and a blue and red neon “sushi open” sign in the window, you would hardly think is a place where one of the top sushi chefs in the city would work his masterpiece in.
Stepping into the store evokes a completely different feel from the exterior as you enter a narrow restaurant with a quaint atmosphere. As you walk in, you will be welcomed with their refrigerated cake display that houses a number of their subtle tasting yet flavourful desserts that will be sure to satisfy any taste buds.
To your left is a row of tables which leads you to the very far end of the restaurant where the “sushi group” sits at the sushi counter. Here, chef Kaji performs his magic during lunch hours.
My selection of the evening was the Cafe au lait Chirashi-sushi, which turned out to be one surprise after another. While I’m not quite sure what the relevance of the name is to the dish, the dish did prove to be “chirashi”ed with a myriad of seafood.
This complete dinner, at $28.00, starts off with a seaweed salad garnished with artificial crab meat resting atop the seaweed in vinegar sauce with white sesame sprinkled on top. Just the right tanginess to the sauce, it was a good beginning.
The main chirashi-sushi proved to be one surprise after another. The ever so elegantly displayed mountain filled bowl of seafood was quite colourful with the reds of the tuna, orange of the salmon, whites of the squid, and the green of the shiso leaf (perilla leaf). Of course we can’t forget the purple of the blueberries that were sprinkled on for good measure. While I was a little turned away at having blueberries mixed in with my fish, it was nonetheless a tasty finish to the meal.
There were at least 6 different types of fish in addition to two strips of unagi hidden in the middle layer of the vinegared rice. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my meal comprised of all of this.
Afterwards, you get to choose your piece of cake to finish off your meal. My choice for the evening was a Chocolate Japanese Sake cake, which was more like a chocolate mousse infused with sake. Not too sweet, not too overpowering a sake flavour, and ever so smooth, I really liked this a lot. There were four of us at the table and I had to try everyone else’s desserts just to see what they all tasted like. My second favourite of the evening turned out to be the cheesecake which had just the right amount of richness to it. Oddly enough, the green tea cake with red beans didn’t quite do anything for me. I usually devour anything green tea flavoured but this time, this was at the bottom of my list of favourites. It was too dry a sponge cake with not enough flavour to it.
Even after we had all finished our meals, the waitresses were too polite to ask us to consider finishing up as the restaurant had already closed. They cleaned all the other tables away, the kitchen was cleaned, and waitresses were I’m sure ready to leave. However they were nice enough to wait 30 minutes after closing time. There was another table apart from us however, that had just left a few minutes prior.
The owner graciously thanked us for coming asking us if we enjoyed our meals. A little chit chat to end the evening off and we left all satiated with a full stomach.
An interesting fact: Café Michi seems to be one of very few cafés that actually serve Blue Mountain coffee. At $5.50 per cup, it’s not the cheapest of coffees, but seeing as the Japanese are the most importers of this bean, I suppose it’s not surprising to see this on the menu. The Columbian Supremo was listed as $2.50 per cup, another favourite of many coffee drinkers.
My first experience here at Michi’s proved to be a good one. I would definetely recommend it to anyone wanting fresh sushi, in addition to wanting to try other homemade Japanese dishes out like Japanese curry rice or beef donburi. Seeing these on the menu makes me want to come back and try them sometime.
The next time, however, I’ll have to remember to duck down at the entrance as those chimes hanging from the ceiling are hung so low that my head hit them on the way in and out. The restaurant food as well as its decor, are definitely suited to the Japanese.
