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Hapa Izakaya - West End, Vancouver
Jul. 29th, 2009 11:40 pmPart of the 2009 Izakaya Crawl.
THIS IS A REVIEW:
We didn't really need a reservation here, either. We came in and they were ready to seat us right away, but I mentioned my reservation anyway.
This picture is not an exaggeration of how dimly lit the place is. I am usually a fan of dimly lit restaurants, I think the mood feels more intimate and special that way. However, I was disappointed by the overall decoration of the place. It was kinda boring. There was no flair. All minimalism.
We ordered drinks: a Harajuku Girl ($7), a blend of vodka, butterscotch schnapps, sour raspberry schnapps, Calpis (a Japanese yogurt-flavored drink) and soda; an Umeshu Tini ($7), a blend of plum wine, vodka, lemon and sweet; two pours (about 4 shots, I would guess) of Takezake, the house sake chilled in a bamboo server ($16); and a Calpis Vodka Soda ($5.25 and exactly what it says on the tin). The Harajuku Girl was really sweet, almost to the point of being sickening, but some people like that in a drink. The Boyfriend and I split the Takezake and liked it, especially the fun serving method.
We attempted to order food. We started off by saying we wanted their Goma-Ae, a blend of green beans, tuna sashimi and feta. I can't tell you how it tasted because they were out--and then the waitress went into a long, long list of all the things they didn't have. The kind of list where at the end you want to say "Well, what DO you have?" She said that the next day they were having their staff appreciation day or something like that and were closed, so they didn't have as much stock as usual. This weirded me out because you would think that when you're talking about RAW FISH and RAW MEAT, either it's so perishable that it should be thrown out at the end of the day ANYWAY, or else one day in the freezer/fridge shouldn't make that much of a difference.
So we were rather put out, especially because some of the other things she named were the things other people wanted to order. So we called a time-out and regrouped, with some discussion of leaving immediately, but since we didn't want to rush our drinks, we decided to order two things anyway.
If you can squint you can perhaps see the Beef Tataki ($7.95) that we ordered, but here's a picture that shows it better:
Tataki is very briefly seared pieces of meat with ginger. Hapa's version was served with a sesame-chili sauce. It was okay. I'm not a super big fan of meat that is still mooing. I couldn't help but feel that the garnish and sauce overwhelmed the meat.
I apologize for the quality of this picture--I took two pictures, and one of them is too dark, and the other one is washed out. I wasn't looking carefully at the picture afterwards. Anyway, this is Renkon Gyoza ($6.90): dumplings with slices of lotus root for a crunch. I liked this quite a bit, but I felt like the serving presentation was kind of deceptive. It's three gyoza cut in half. For almost $7. I know Hapa is a much fancier place than Hon's, but after getting 6 whole potstickers there for $1.37, I felt like this was overpriced to an insane degree. Ground pork is not that expensive.
Overall we were dissatisfied. I felt bad because this was my roommate's first izakaya experience and it sucked, and she was originally planning to leave after this. She decided to stick around and follow us to Gyoza King.
THIS IS A SUMMARY:
Name: Hapa Izakaya
Location: 1479 Robson St, Vancouver, BC 604-689-4272
Prices: $4-12 for small plates. Probably about $30/person to eat as dinner.
Service: When you read reviews for Hapa Izakaya, you will see one thing over and over: "The waitresses are hot." Personally, when any place of business's employees are ALL sexy/a single ethnicity/men/women/young etc, without a good reason why this should be the case (eg if a place requires its employees to speak a certain language in addition to English, thus making people of a certain ethnicity more likely to know that language), I don't think "Awesome!", I think "Illegal hiring practices." But then I'm a bleeding heart stick-in-the-mud. Maybe you LIKE objectification with your sushi. For what it's worth, our waitress (who was indeed good-looking) was apologetic about the restaurant being low on, y'know, food. IE the reason that I wanted to go to Hapa.
Food: There are some innovative combinations but they don't always work out in practice. The Harajuku Girl sounded great on paper but we all agreed it was way too sweet.
Recommended?: I don't know if this place is just overrated, or if I'm not the target audience, or whatever, but I was seriously unimpressed. And even if I was the target audience, I can't imagine not being irritated by the fact that THEY WERE OUT OF EVERYTHING. Well, not everything, but everything that we wanted.
THIS IS A REVIEW:
We didn't really need a reservation here, either. We came in and they were ready to seat us right away, but I mentioned my reservation anyway.
This picture is not an exaggeration of how dimly lit the place is. I am usually a fan of dimly lit restaurants, I think the mood feels more intimate and special that way. However, I was disappointed by the overall decoration of the place. It was kinda boring. There was no flair. All minimalism.
We ordered drinks: a Harajuku Girl ($7), a blend of vodka, butterscotch schnapps, sour raspberry schnapps, Calpis (a Japanese yogurt-flavored drink) and soda; an Umeshu Tini ($7), a blend of plum wine, vodka, lemon and sweet; two pours (about 4 shots, I would guess) of Takezake, the house sake chilled in a bamboo server ($16); and a Calpis Vodka Soda ($5.25 and exactly what it says on the tin). The Harajuku Girl was really sweet, almost to the point of being sickening, but some people like that in a drink. The Boyfriend and I split the Takezake and liked it, especially the fun serving method.
We attempted to order food. We started off by saying we wanted their Goma-Ae, a blend of green beans, tuna sashimi and feta. I can't tell you how it tasted because they were out--and then the waitress went into a long, long list of all the things they didn't have. The kind of list where at the end you want to say "Well, what DO you have?" She said that the next day they were having their staff appreciation day or something like that and were closed, so they didn't have as much stock as usual. This weirded me out because you would think that when you're talking about RAW FISH and RAW MEAT, either it's so perishable that it should be thrown out at the end of the day ANYWAY, or else one day in the freezer/fridge shouldn't make that much of a difference.
So we were rather put out, especially because some of the other things she named were the things other people wanted to order. So we called a time-out and regrouped, with some discussion of leaving immediately, but since we didn't want to rush our drinks, we decided to order two things anyway.
If you can squint you can perhaps see the Beef Tataki ($7.95) that we ordered, but here's a picture that shows it better:
Tataki is very briefly seared pieces of meat with ginger. Hapa's version was served with a sesame-chili sauce. It was okay. I'm not a super big fan of meat that is still mooing. I couldn't help but feel that the garnish and sauce overwhelmed the meat.
I apologize for the quality of this picture--I took two pictures, and one of them is too dark, and the other one is washed out. I wasn't looking carefully at the picture afterwards. Anyway, this is Renkon Gyoza ($6.90): dumplings with slices of lotus root for a crunch. I liked this quite a bit, but I felt like the serving presentation was kind of deceptive. It's three gyoza cut in half. For almost $7. I know Hapa is a much fancier place than Hon's, but after getting 6 whole potstickers there for $1.37, I felt like this was overpriced to an insane degree. Ground pork is not that expensive.
Overall we were dissatisfied. I felt bad because this was my roommate's first izakaya experience and it sucked, and she was originally planning to leave after this. She decided to stick around and follow us to Gyoza King.
THIS IS A SUMMARY:
Name: Hapa Izakaya
Location: 1479 Robson St, Vancouver, BC 604-689-4272
Prices: $4-12 for small plates. Probably about $30/person to eat as dinner.
Service: When you read reviews for Hapa Izakaya, you will see one thing over and over: "The waitresses are hot." Personally, when any place of business's employees are ALL sexy/a single ethnicity/men/women/young etc, without a good reason why this should be the case (eg if a place requires its employees to speak a certain language in addition to English, thus making people of a certain ethnicity more likely to know that language), I don't think "Awesome!", I think "Illegal hiring practices." But then I'm a bleeding heart stick-in-the-mud. Maybe you LIKE objectification with your sushi. For what it's worth, our waitress (who was indeed good-looking) was apologetic about the restaurant being low on, y'know, food. IE the reason that I wanted to go to Hapa.
Food: There are some innovative combinations but they don't always work out in practice. The Harajuku Girl sounded great on paper but we all agreed it was way too sweet.
Recommended?: I don't know if this place is just overrated, or if I'm not the target audience, or whatever, but I was seriously unimpressed. And even if I was the target audience, I can't imagine not being irritated by the fact that THEY WERE OUT OF EVERYTHING. Well, not everything, but everything that we wanted.
