I love where we live. Not only are we ridiculously close to Stanley Park, English Bay and our respective workplaces (when we are not working from home), we are also close to a range of delicious cafes and restaurants. The West End isn’t necessarily the ‘coolest’ suburb (think Kitsilano and Mt Pleasant for the trendy areas) as it’s pretty stuck in its ways. It seems as though most of the people that live in the West End have never lived anywhere else.
Kingyo Izakaya is one of the more trendy spots that are in our suburb and I haven’t heard a bad word about it. Conveniently it’s located across the intersection from our apartment, so a perfect destination for a wet weather date night and an opportune time to share a bottle of wine.
The Izakaya is often busy, so our advance booking didn’t go amiss. To my mild disappointment, we were seated at a table for two, rather than the shared benches around the leafy interior (separated by plexiglass of course). Where we sat was more intimate, but perhaps slightly less atmospheric than it could have been.
The menu was quite seafood heavy, but there was still so much we wanted to try. After placing our order, I checked with the waitress about the quantity of food and she warned us that we’d ordered a fair amount of food and she hoped we were hungry. We stuck with our decision, thinking we’d probably just take any leftovers home.
Our first course was the tempura prawns which were cooked to absolute perfection. This was followed by the karaage chicken which did not disappoint, despite not being the ‘extra spicy’ version that Andy had wanted. I forced us to order salmon sushi (I have never seen Andy order sushi in my life) and he came away with the conclusion that actually, he does like sushi.
We ordered two bowls: one was pork on rice, the other was a noodle dish in the most delicious broth I think I have ever tasted. We were definitely starting to get pretty full, but fortunately the broth found a place in my stomach to settle and we ended up packaging up some of the pork dish to take home. The service across the course of the night was exceptional and we left as very happy (and full) customers.
