Restaurant review: Sake Café

By Sherman Chan,
Special to The Post

As much as I'm always on the lookout for good food, convenience often trumps flavour. This is often the case when the kids are with me, or if we don’t have too much time to eat before an appointment or event.
On a recent trek to Vancouver, we ended up walking to Broadway and randomly choosing a restaurant. It was 11:00 a.m. and we stumbled upon Sake Cafe. My wife Viv decided to go for the "choose any 3 items" meal for $8.95. It included green salad and miso soup. There isn’t much to say about either dish, but the dressing was gingery and sweet. Looking rather pale and plain, the gyoza were more like steamed dumplings. The bottom was only slightly seared, but on the positive side, the dumplings themselves were not bad. With a filling of mostly veggies, the meat was moist and only a little chewy. The dumpling skin was thin and slightly chewy.
The tempura was soggy and greasy. The batter was quite dense and it was intermittently crispy. Either the oil wasn't hot enough or the batter didn't really get a chance to cook through. Again, I'm not sure if this was due to poor cooking technique or the fact that we were there before everything was ready to go for lunch. Viv's last dish of the set meal was the teriyaki chicken with rice. The chicken itself was tender and juicy but the skin was not rendered enough and was quite pale. There was an adequate amount of sauce on top of the fluffy rice.
We also ordered the Big Roll consisting of chopped scallop, cucumber and tempura bits on the inside with unagi and avocado on the outside. We found the rice was a bit soft with only a slight hint of sugar and rice wine vinegar. As a whole, the roll was pleasant enough to eat with plenty of ingredients while being conservatively sauced.
Our last dish was the assorted sashimi, which was a respectable portion for $14.95. Everything looked like it should have and nothing was particularly out-of-the-ordinary. I appreciated the large slices of fish, especially the tuna, but they were cut too large because they were texturally too dense. 
Although there were issues with some dishes, Sake Cafe is a good spot when you’re in the area and looking for quick, reasonably priced food.

Sherman Chan is the #1 ranked food blogger on the Vancouver portal of Urbanspoon.com. Read more of his reviews at www.shermansfoodadventures.com.

Sake Café
887 West Broadway | (604) 876-3103

The Good:
• Reasonable pricing
• Decent portions

The Bad:
• Some items were ordinary