Octopus Garden

Today, I finally tried my first ever Omakase Japanese experience. This is basically a Japanese tasting menu where you leave the menu up to the chef and you just experience the best of the best the restaurant has to offer. We went for the $100 per person option. Octopus Garden is a small restaurant in Kitsilano. The Omakase option isn't in their menus so all you had to do is mention that you want to try the Omakase and they offer two choices a $65 or a $100 experience. We started off with choosing a tea. We had the pear green tea. It was light in flavour but it complemented the whole dinner. We then had our first dish of the day we had the Bluefin Tuna Salad. This dish consisted of greens with a few pieces of tuna dressed with a ponzu vinaigrette. It was light and the sourness opened my appetite for more. The next item up was the Uni Shooter which I found out just now that it is Sado-san's signature item. Sado-san is the sushi chef at Octopus Garden. I had bad experiences eating uni and I wasn't a big fan of uni after eating it at restaurants such as Guu and other tapa places but I had to try the one here. The shooter consisted of yam, rice, quail's egg and uni, you mix it all together and you just down it all in one shot. I started off tasting the uni by itself first and it wasn't that bad. Then I mixed it all together and attempted to shoot it in one shot but I ended up eating morsels of it one at a time. My bf didn't end up eating his so I took his. We also had a sashimi course consisting of Albacore Tuna, Amberjack, Tako. We had lobster sashimi which was on top of a still moving lobster body which we grew very sad when eating so we tried to demolish the sashimi asap. The Lobster had edible gold flakes on top with fish eggs and more uni.We had lobster tempura which was light in flavour but the tempura batter did not stick to the lobster pieces so it was still very wet. Not as crispy as I would have liked it. We also had nigiri, we had geoduck, albacore toro etc. We had a Wagyu beef which is slow cooked, tender and melt in your mouth textures with veggies as well. For dessert we had green tea ice cream with red bean and blueberries on top of a matcha green tea brownie. This dessert was unique I never thought green tea brownies existed till this day. Overall a unforgettable experience with great service, quality food and a combination of different flavours dancing in your mouth.

Octopus Garden
Location: 1995 Cornwall Ave, Vancouver
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2 /5