Tokyo Thyme

On the day I visited The Mac Shack‘s media event, I arrived early and starving. I decided to get some snacks at Tokyo Thyme, a couple stores down after a quick search on Yelp.

This Japanese owned restaurant has some interesting and unique Japanese dishes. I managed to only order a few appetizers with Dee, but trust me, I wanted to have a full blown meal right then and there.

We started with Agedashi Tofu.  My favorite thing about it was the sauce because you can taste its authenticity, it’s sweet yet light. My only issue with this tofu dish was that the tofu wasn’t crispy.

Next stop was very fancy, elegant looking and tasty Tuna Stack.

It was chopped red and white tuna with avocado, mountain potato, nori and green onions (raw quail egg can be added for an extra 50 cents). It came with some nori sheets and a bowl of rice. The way to eat it is to break the pretty tuna stack and really mix everything together, then take a sheet of nori and make your own bite sized sushi with the rice and tuna.

This tuna stack was so yummy. I had asked what the sauce at the bottom of the tuna dish was.  ”Secret sauce” was the answer I got from the owner. Everything was fresh, had a really nice texture, and the secret awesome sauce just binds everything together.

Our last two appetizers were Baked Eggplant and a Shitaki Tama Q roll.

The baked eggplant was glazed with special miso, it was buttery, sweet and had a crispy sugar glaze at the top of the eggplant, a really nice dish.

Shitaki Tama Q roll was a vegetarian roll with shitaki mushroom, tamago, avocado and cucumber.  For a vegetarian roll, this was very well done. It was tasty and the avocado gave really it a nice creamy texture.

After these appetizers, I planned to come back for a proper full meal. I brought a couple friends with me a couple days later to go for lunch here with me.

For lunch I started with a half order of the House Special Sunomono.  This was not a noodle in sour soup kind of sunomono. I remembered my Japanese friend told me that a sunomono is basically any vegetable prepared cold and somewhat pickled. This house special sunomono had smoked salmon, crab, prawn, avocado, mountain potato, and everything was wrapped in cucumber ribbon. The rolls were sitting on top of a sour sauce with some cooked seaweed. This was extremely tasty, refreshing and not to mention, pretty cooking! I really got to taste each ingredient as I chewed, I absolutely loved it.

My Chirashi don arrived shortly after I finished my sunomono, and again, this was a very fancy, pretty looking dish. I liked the fact that some of the sashimi like octopus and saba came with their own seasoning on top to compliment the seafood. I also really liked the fact that there wasn’t a huge amount of unseasoned steamed rice underneath. The rice was topped with very thin slices of shiso, nori, and daikon, all together they had nice texture, and the shiso made the rice taste minty and refreshing.

This was definitely a hidden gem in Vancouver. Everything was prepared carefully, beautifully and was tasty. If you want something different and authentic, this is the place to check out. I love this place.

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Tokyo Thyme
5405 West Blvd
Vancouver, BC V6M
(604) 263-3262