Wa's Japanese Restaurant

My, my, my , it's been a long time since I've wrote. It's been quite a busy month (anniversary, birthday, etc), so excuse me! I will be trying to put old posts up in the next little while. I kind of got lazy and fell out of schedule with blogging, buuuuuut let's go! 

Hope everyone's been well. Recently, Calgary was hit by a flood and we're slowly rebuilding our city. I won't go into much details because I'll leave that for a different post. Not to worry, my family and I weren't hit. We're much far north from the downtown area that suffered drastically. 

Last month, Lance and I got to check out a small little Japanese place just off Center Street and 17th Avenue, NW. Oh my! This place is incredibly small but it's so intimate. It's so authentic and fresh, it's definitely one of the best sushi places in Calgary. We had reservations on a Saturday for I believe 7:30 pm just for safety because usually it's quite busy. 

The reason we chose to go to this restaurant was because for years I've been reading about a few bloggers that go to Japan and eat these awesome dishes called Chirashi. Actually, I'm kind of a fool because I always skimmed over the name of the dish or either forget it and thought that you could only get it in Japan. LOL. That was totally not true.The way I found this place was through Lance's sister's Instagram. My jaw dropped when I saw the picture, I basically begged Lance to bring me here.Since then, I've found a few other restaurants that sell Chirashi, but it's never like Wa's!

Lance and I ordered a lot of food between the two of us, ooops! But oh man, we absolutely loved it. 

We had the fried eggplant and I apologize because I cannot think of the name for this dish and the next one. You should give this a try if you're a eggplant fan. It's so yummy the way they cook it with the sauce it's served with. I just can't describe the taste. I actually put the sauce on my Chirashi rice, hehe.

Next up is a sashimi appetizer, I cannot think of the name, but it's like kimchi sashimi. I believe this one is tuna with avocado and a mild spicy sauce. You don't need soy sauce with this dish. You should enjoy it the way it's served because it's already marinated for you.

We ordered a few creamy scallop sushi, a piece of toro sashimi and salmon eggs, except they mixed up my salmon eggs for uni. =( It's okay, they sent it out to me after. =D I think it's become a habit for me to try toro at almost every Japanese restaurant we go to now. It's incredibly soft and one of my favorite sashimi. If it wasn't so expensive, I could totally just have a lot of it for dinner, hehe. The creamy scallop sushi was pretty standard compared to other Japanese restaurants. Lance and I tend to order this sushi at every Japanese place we go to too, even if we're eating other dishes than sushi. 

Now the star of the meal! OMG. It was love at first sight. Chirashi always comes with a variety of sashimi (YUM) and garnishes over a warm bed of rice. It's always beautiful and artistic the way they arrange the ingredients. It's super pricey but worth it. I recommend everyone to at least try this dish if you are heading down to Wa's. I can't do these posts on an empty tummy anymore, they just make me want to eat it again! Hopefully I'll get to have some soon. *HINT HINT* Lance. ;-) 

We also had the pork ramen because it was a tad cold that day and Lance was craving it. 

For the final dish, I ordered a Chawanmushi to share. You won't believe how excited I was to find this here in Calgary. Everywhere I go, I always look for this appie but can never find it. I believe it's more common to find it in Vancouver but this is probably the only restaurant here in Calgary that makes it. My parents always ordered it for us when we ate Japanese food in Singapore and Vancouver. It's a steam savoury egg custard with different kinds of ingredients steamed into it such as mushrooms, prawns, kamaboko, etc. This particular one only had a prawn at the bottom and a few salmon eggs, green onions and ginger on top. I wished they had added kamaboko and mushrooms in it as it would have made the dish more aesthetically pleasing and delicious. Nonetheless, I would totally order it again.

Overall we had a pleasant evening with our belly filled to the rim with food. Besides our slight hiccup with the uni, everything was splendid. I can't wait to go back to Wa's as there was a bunch of other dishes Lance and I wanted to try. 

Happy Stampede to all my fellow Calgarians. Yee-haw! 

Easter 2013

Hope everybody's Easter was great and just like Zach Braff's Facebook status, I hope everyone was an ambitious sperm and found all the eggs!

My Easter weekend rituals tend to revolve around the church a bit. Going to Good Friday mass and the Easter Virgil mass on Saturday. Growing up these masses were such a bore to me! But as an adult now I realize the importance of Easter and there's always such a calmness attending mass and it's really meaningful.

After Good Friday's mass, I met with Lance after he got off work as we planned to have a date that day. Oh my goodness, I can't tell you how beautiful that day was. The sun was shining and it was warm. Over 10 degrees that day, I believe. We were even sitting outside on a bench and having a chat while a nearby street performer was singing. It was perfect. I regret not taking pictures.

We grabbed some salted caramel macarons from Yann's and honestly, whenever I think of salted caramel, it's such a weird concept to me. The sweet and saltiness. It's disgusting! BUT when I bit into one it was so heavenly! We ended up buying four more.

We ended up at the hotel Lance works at to meet up with a couple of his coworkers to have a few drinks. We started off drinking at the hotel's lounge where we had some marvellous laughs with our bartender and then we worked our way to Julio's Barrio from some margaritas and appies. All in all it was a good night with these girls. 

This Easter, Lance bought 7 Kinder Surprises and hid it all around my room. Though it was pretty easy to find it was also a very thoughtful surprise. I loved Kinder Surprise growing up but I never got any cool toys from it. Just my luck I guess. BUT GUESS WHAT?! I opened the first one and I got a Barbie figurine. Oh man, I was so pysched! It was so pretty with her little black glamour dress. I know, silly right? A twenty something year old excited about a Barbie figurine, hahaha. The next day I opened another one and got another Barbie!!! Wooooooo! I was over the moon. I had to open another one but I gave the chocolate to Lance to eat. Unfortunately that one was a lame bracelet which I threw away. I was pretty upset that my luck ran out. Hopefully there's more Barbies in the last four eggs... Hahaha. One can hope right?

On Sunday, Lance and I got some takeout sushi from Misato. I love their sushi here because one of their rolls is super massive filled with a variety of sashimi. I didn't get to take a picture this time, but here's a past picture. I'm not kidding, it's the size of my palm! We also got the Chirashi sushi which is just a whole load of different sashimi on rice because I've been searching for this for years now. I actually thought I had to go to Japan just to find it. LOL

Anyone watched season premier of Game of Thrones yet? Let me know what you think!