Come for the sashimi, stay for the masks
Finger foods and snacks galore at Tamaru Shoten joint in East Vancouver
Having been busy in East Vancouver, where the restaurant fertility runs high, I took my sweet old time getting to Rajio Japanese Public House on West 10th Avenue.
Rajio opened four years ago and it doesn’t need much publicity judging by how busy it was on a rainy weekday evening. In the past, this space has been home to Cafe Madeleine and Pair Bistro.
Rajio is in the ever-expanding family of Tamaru Shoten restaurants. Other members include Kingyo (the oldest), Suika and Raisu, which I reviewed in the fall. I like them all. They’re high-energy places with creative dishes and a hip disposition; I’d typecast them as izakaya (gastropubs).
Rajio is the most casual of them all. Good music flows and the centrepiece is a wall display of plastic masks with big round eyes — Pokemon characters, Mickey and Minnie Mouse and others, all radioactively lit from behind. It makes the room glow. Stare at them too long, you could get a scary clown vibe.
The company’s restaurant names allude to summertime in some way, says company spokeswoman Kaori Yoshii. Suika means watermelon in Japanese. But the rest, as I see it, have but a thin connection to summer. Kingyo means goldfish, which Yoshii says can be found at summertime markets. I believe she refers to a game where children scoop goldfish at night markets. Raisu is a Japanese pronunciation of rice and, I agree, people do eat it in the summer. “Actually, it kind of fell off the track,” Yoshii says.
Rajio is a stretch, too. “Japanese kids do an exercise routine during the summer break to keep in shape and the music for it came over the radio when it was first introduced in Japan. We still do it,” Yoshii says. There is a small shrine by the restaurant’s bar and, as Yoshii says, vendors sell masks at Japanese shrines like the ones on the wall in the summer. “That’s why we have the masks on the wall,” she says.
I’m getting totally sidetracked. Regarding food, “the concept is really about people stopping on the way home from work for some snacks and finger foods,” Yoshii says.
The menu has an Osaka bias, starting with the kushikatsu. Translated, it means skewered cutlets, kind of like tonkatsu, but smaller and finer, and this Osaka specialty was first introduced in a restaurant at the base of the Osaka Tower, targeting factory workers. Skewers (vegetable, meat, seafood) cost $1.50 to $1.90 each and the chef also makes kushikatsu with gyoza, Kurobuta pork sausage, Camembert cheese and octopus balls. The ones I tried weren’t greasy and the panko coating and the sauce were very light.
I didn’t try another go-to dish here. It’s the pig trotter ($6.80), a pork foot slowly stewed with salt and garlic sauce.
“Chinese people really like it and we have people from Okinawa who come in for it,” Yoshii says. “I just really don’t like eating feet. It’s kind of scary, but flavour-wise, it works.” Now I regret not having ordered it.
The sashimi was very good. We ordered seven kinds (two pieces of each) for $17.50 and the fish was bright and fresh. Oysters were served on the half-shell.
I loved the hot stone bowl crab bibimbap ($13.20) with snow crab, salmon roe, julienned egg omelette, herbs, julienned nori and crab “miso,” which, Yoshii explains, is crab guts. Toss the entire thing about and it’s a light and lovely dish.
A fresh sheet was difficult to decipher as it was a jumble of Japanese and English script, but we ferreted out the grilled pork cheek ($6.80), tasty with a too-teeny bit of spicy sauce, and sea urchin and salmon roe carbonara made with udon noodles ($13.80). The latter didn’t have the bacon and cheese punch of Italian carbonara pasta and proved to be too bland, but Yoshii says it’s a popular dish.
Shao mai (five for $6.80) are steamed dumplings that are constructed a little more loosely than the Chinese pork siu mai.
And the $38 “shockingly huge, two-pound rib steak with wasabi and garlic soy sauce” is not just a curiosity. “It’s super gigantic, but I’ve seen two girls finish it together along with other dishes,” Yoshii says.
For dessert, we ordered almond tofu and expected a healthy but bland dish; it wasn’t. A pineapple sauce blanketed the pudding and it was a lovely dessert, not too sweet and light.