Less is more shouldn’t apply to the servers Dining Out

Mye Restaurant LOCATION: 143 Church St. (west of Trafalgar Rd.), Oakville, 905-849-8989, www.myerestaurant.ca EXECUTIVE CHEF: Mo Aoki HOURS: Lunch: Tuesday to Friday 12 to 2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tuesday to Saturday 5:30 to 10:30 p.m., Sunday 5:30 to 10 p.m. WHEELCHAIR ACCCESS: Accessible, with equipped washroom Anyone who has contemplated the 15 stones on raked white sand at the Ryoanji temple rock garden in Kyoto comprehends the Zen of simplicity.

While Mye Restaurant doesn’t exactly evoke similar enlightenment and awe of profound emptiness, it does do an exceptionally nice job with tempura seafood and vegetables. Owner/ chef Mo Aoki, who came from Japan to open Mye 18 years ago, obviously understands simplicity, whether in dishes such as tempura or in the serene, fresh setting with seafoam green walls and square birch chairs that repeat the shape of bare windows. The only ornaments are a hearth in the small room off the entrance — a delightful spot for a romantic meal — and display cases of sake cups, each vivid as a jewel. The real jewels at Mye are utterly fresh sushi and sashimi, the latter glistening like satin but with the texture of velvet. Dozens of varieties are offered à la carte at prices ranging from $ 3.50 for six pieces of cucumber roll to $ 17 for five pieces of giant clam sashimi. A medium sashimi appetizer ($ 18.50) displays its wares simply: white tuna, grouper, clam, octopus, thick pieces of salmon and tuna resting on fanned wafers of cucumber, with mackerel set on lemon and topped with a tiny ruffle of grated scallion. White daikon radish is shaved to translucency.

Selections from a separate appetizer menu include delicious agemaki roll ($ 8), six pieces of tempura eel sushi served on a banana leaf. Each seems to have kissed the batter and flirted with the fryer, the exterior crunch revealing moist eel. Less successful is deep- fried squid ($ 9.50), too chewy, and seafood treasure ($ 9.50): shrimp, salmon, scallop, shiitake and oyster mushrooms, and onion steamed and served in a tinfoil envelope, but so mild as to be flavourless. Mye triumphs with tempura. The batter is imported from Japan, the vegetable oil is fresh and clean, and the ingredients are properly chilled into complacency before being surprised by sizzling oil. The result is delicate, crisp coating and vegetables or seafood that yield their rawness but remain pristine. Main courses may be sushi, sashimi or variations on tempura, teriyaki or steak. Steak with Seafood Dinner ($ 31) brings large, tender shrimp, large scallops sliced in half and mushrooms, all sautéed to a golden finish in Mye’s gingery steak sauce, along with half- inch thick morsels of tenderloin matching the scallops in size, almost a half- pound of it, done to a pink medium rareness, as requested. Broccoli on the plate was pleasantly crunchy and there was also a red pepper harumaki, a slender, crispy fried egg roll.

Desserts include mitsumame ($ 6.50 ) — resilient cubes of unflavoured gelatin with vanilla ice cream and fruit cocktail — as well as a crème brûlée trio ($ 9).

Often, these taste artificial and ambiguous. They make one yearn for a time when crème brûlée wasn’t a canvas for a chef’s misguided fancy. But here, maple syrup, green jasmine tea and cranberry were natural tasting, identifiable but subtle enough that I’d order them again. Who knows whether I’d get them? At Saturday dinner, we ordered sesame ice cream ($4.25)and green tea ice cream with red beans ($ 5.50). The red beans were missing ( though they appeared on the bill) and by the time the green tea ice cream was a slick in the dish, the sesame ice cream still hadn’t arrived. The server explained that the restaurant was busy. Diffident through much of the service, she’d placed dishes on the table while looking elsewhere and, at one point, hovered over us with a dish in hand, talking to other servers while we waited to see if and when it was going to land. Another quibble: the bottle of red wine was warmer than room temperature. Would that I were enlightened enough to overlook the rocky service and ruminate only on the simplicity and the tempura. Email Judy Gerstel at jgerstel@thestar.ca.