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! 

Banff Day 2

Day 2 started with a McDonald's breakfast that was conveniently down the road. We didn't really know where to grab breakfast until we explored the town and McDonald's usually hits the spot. 

My nails for the trip.

The day was pretty grey and gloomy, but that didn't matter to us. We walked up to the park to snap some pictures of the surrounding. I secretly wished I saw a moose as I had seen one there years ago.  Our walk was pretty peaceful since it was pretty deserted. We were able to chat and catch up with one another. Nonetheless here's some beautiful mountains and a frozen river that you could walk across!

On our walk we found a gazebo which we decided to take more pictures. I'm such a dork because I had the camera on timer but I couldn't tell whether it was on so here's me running to Lance. LOL. It's okay because we ended up with a good picture after. We proceeded to have a little photo shoot on the steps of the gazebo after.

Oh don't mind me, I'm just touching the tip of the mountain. =)

After walking around for a bit, Lance got hungry so we had to go grab some food. Lance had ramen on his mind since he walked past it in the morning when he bought breakfast. I didn't really have a choice so it ramen it was. MMMM. Such a good choice. It's right beside McDonald's on Banff Avenue. It's such a tiny cramped restaurant but the ramen was one of the best I've eaten in a long time. I got the Tan Tan Ramen which had an extremely flavorful base.  It's mildly spicy and peanutty. The portion was just perfect for me and it doesn't cost very much. Lance and I were discussing how this was better than going to a fast food restaurant because you're getting a much healthier meal here and your food comes out here uber fast! It's definitely authentic in my books. 

After eating, we walked around town and visited a few souvenir shops. We even went to a thrift store! LOL, I love thrift stores. They're so fun to look through and see what people actually gave away. Sadly there weren't any vintage beauties to add to my collection that day. I loved exploring the town even though it was so small. It's just so great because of the different tiny stores on the streets, you just want to peek through and look at all the little gems. I was able to stop by David's Tea to pick up some oolong tea as I was a bit sick and wanted to make some at night while we were cozying up in our room.

Of course, since a few hours have past, Lance was getting a bit tired from walking around (poor him) so we had to make another stop for him to eat. This guy just eats and eats. Apparently he hates when he asked me whether I'm hungry and I say no. I imagine this is what he looks like on the inside. D:< We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory to eat and ran into our waitress from Giorgio's Trattoria. Small town! She's so sweet, I kind of wish we got to know her; not in a creepy way... LOL!

After lunch number 2 (what a fatty), we went back to the hotel to grab our swimming things and took a taxi up to the Hot Springs. Ahhh, such a perfect relaxation time. The sun was almost setting and we had such a great view of the mountains from where we were sitting. Well actually, I got the great view. Lance couldn't see anything without his glasses, hahaha. It was perfect because even though the air was so COLD, the water was just perfect. I didn't even want to leave. Except we had to leave eventually and while I was in the change room, I happened to walk past two girls who wouldn't stop glaring at me. When I past them I heard one of them ask the other whether she thought my boobs were real. Really?! Really? Because 21 years old, I have 10g's to drop on a pair of perfect plastic boobs. LOL. This isn't the first time strangers have said this about me. I even had people yell at me from their car asking me "are those real?" Hahaha. I guess I'm honored people think they're "big, fake, perfect" because, baby, I was born with it. WELL not born with it. But they grew naturally. You know what I mean. That would be creepy if babies were born with boobs. EWWW.

Just a lonely moose slowly melting outside the hotspring.

Moving on then... 

We headed back to the hotel to drop our things off and proceeded to dinner. I was kind of scared that we would be late as it was about 8pm when we arrived at The Bison. Luckily there were fellow patrons arriving much later than we were. We were able grab a table there quickly and ordered. We had the bison carpaccio to start and I had the bison ribeye with extra veggies, no potatoes while Lance and the rabbit leg... UGH I can't believe he got the rabbit since we have a bunny together. I don't know what he was thinking but he said he enjoyed his meal. Oh well. It was interesting having bison because I've never had it before. I mean it tasted like beef but aren't they closely related anyways? I was pretty pleased that they were accommodating to me not wanting the potatoes but more vegetables. The interior had a great vibe to it, but it was definitely too dark for my taste. For dessert, we got the beer-a-misu and creme brulee to share. YUM. I kind of ended up eating the whole creme brulee to myself because it had the perfect creamy custardy taste to it and the shortbread cookies that accompanied it melted in your mouth. LOL, I am so selfish. 

Rabbit leg.

Bison rib-eye.

We ended our day with another Dexter session while Lance drank some of his beers. EWWW. Beer bottles have such funny and intriguing labels.