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One of the hidden gems in Richmond Hill. Service and food overall is quite good for uptown quality and prices. Sushi platters are good. Baked stuff li…
Rain On You
Miyabi
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This place is authentic in every way! The owners are Japanese and they really know the good stuff! Their portions are not gigantic as the pricing woul…
Liv Lo
Miyabi
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Really authentic Japanese food. One of the very few Japanese places in GTA that is actually owned by Japanese. Before mentioning the food, I just want…
Foodjunkiez
Miyabi
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Miyabi is open for Casual Dining. Miyabi serves Sushi, Japanese and Asian dishes. Incorrect or missing information? Make a report, or claim the restaurant if you own it!Details
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7 Reviews on “Miyabi”
One of the hidden gems in Richmond Hill. Service and food overall is quite good for uptown quality and prices. Sushi platters are good. Baked stuff like oysters and lobster is the highlight.RM
This place is authentic in every way! The owners are Japanese and they really know the good stuff! Their portions are not gigantic as the pricing would suggest however, this is truly a quality over quantity place. I highly recommend this place at least once because the quality is really there. The service is also very good, super friendly and they know their menu and food inside out.
Really authentic Japanese food. One of the very few Japanese places in GTA that is actually owned by Japanese. Before mentioning the food, I just want to say the service is spectacular. Waitresses are very very polite and helpful. I’m a huge sashimi fan, normally only for salmon, but Miyabi’s sashimi tastes super fresh, and even I’ve come to love the other types of raw fish.Although the price is a little higher for a-la-carte (you can probably go to AYCE with the same price), the quality is not comparable.So if you’re looking for good quality Japanese food, and not just to get your stomach filled with mediocre Jap food, this is the place to be!
Japanese Cooked Food And Sushi. E: Rule of thumb – this has to be a top pun – has it that sushi’s neta (topping) has to be two fingers wide and four fingers long. In that case, Miyabi’s serving is usually not sushi. It is serving less than a full sushi. Think about that when considering the prices at Miyabi. Having said that, I really like Miyabi. Let me explain why.Miyabi is a good choice for cooked food. Sure, sushi, sashimi and especially the maki are good, but with Akasaka in the same plaza and Zen in the city-wide area Miyabi is not going to win the fight. To be clear, the raw fish of Miyabi towers above the multitude of chushi (Chinese) and kushi (Korean) sushi impostors, but as good as the rice in the sushi is, I still advocate for Miyabi’s kitchen or rolls. You will enjoy the chef’s spider rolls.Appetizers first, a personal favourite is the enokimaki ($10). The meat is done very well, the mushrooms are consistently excellent, but the jus is what takes the cake with this dish. Cooking with Mirin does wonders for it. Order it, and like with any other cooked food, watch the Indian chef rear his head out of the kitchen to check out who has ordered the dish. I know, I know, but I am seeing the younger lady and the elderly Japanese cook less and less, or not at all, at Miyabi and, as said, the food is quite good.The beef tataki (raw cured red meat) is tasty, takoyaki is strong and fried kaki is also tender and saucy.For mains, I have had the tonkatsu and katsudon and they are both good. The don will be around $13. I tried the curry and katsudon dish on my last visit as well. The katsu was too crispy. The kare was tasty – the waitress explained that they mix their own in-house – but, and my friend pointed this out, it had nothing else mixed into it. Japanese curry may come with carrot or other accompaniments, but here the kare was pure… kare. They offer Tanindon on their menu. The waitress would explain that it is the same thing as Gyudon (‘beef’-don), but with Tanindon the beef is actually cooked in egg. I am not into ingesting eggplants, but have been told – and it looks that way too – that the nasu misoae is not as good as it was as recently as 2010/2011. I tried the chawanmushi because I had never tasted it before and what better place to try it than in an authentic Japanese restaurant? I like how it is a ‘custard’ that is served as an appetizer. I wonder at a warm egg mixture than contains shrimp and mushrooms. I smile thinking how there is a traditional Japanese food that is served and eaten with a spoon. For sushi you could try the saba, but an even better choice is the sayori when they have it. As good as the sayori is the fried entrails they bring back to the table are something else. The Futomaki is fine, but the Futomaki Deluxe, which is more expensive, contains Sakuradenbu for added flavour and aesthetics. It also does add meat to the normally vegetarian roll. Back in 2011 in central Kyoto, Japan a friend and I asked a sushi chef whether they stock sayori. The chef told us they did, but not before turning to us and wondering where we had heard of sayori. My friend pointed at me and mentioned something about my knowledge of sushi. Knowledgeable or not, the chef looked impressed. Update: no Sayori was made available for the winter of 2012 at Miyabi. The chef explained that he did not order Sayori as his Chinese Canadian customer base is fearful of fish, like Sayori, that might be contaminated due to the fallout from the earthquake in Japan in 2011. Never mind that Sayori is fished on the other side of Japan! Sayori is also available from Korea, but is not as clean or fresh.The umeshiso is some of the best I have tried. It is punchy, but the bite of umeboshi or umezuke (pickled ‘ume,’ which is the Japanese approximation for apricot) is tempered by the shiso (perilla, which has a minty taste). The uni, on the other hand, is hit and miss here. The chef freezes his uni for the summer (off-season) months instead of importing from Chile in the summer, where the sushi is smaller. Miyabi offers Mentaiko, which is not easy to find by the way.On a cold winter night, a fun and zesty option is sukiyaki of course. The hotpot’s base is very well done at Miyabi, yet it does not come cheap. Add egg and a good time is guaranteed (for me anyway). Go ahead and try it regardless of how someone might try to tell you that it can be prepared at home.The last couple of times there have been no gyoza available, and the waitstaff have been apologetic, but they do have good gyoza there. A Japanese restaurant and no gyoza? The waitress laughs at that question.Elsewhere, Miyabi ‘hides’ a Japanese menu for its Japanese customers. Purveyors of natto, and other treats, who can read Japanese, take note. A friend introduced natto to me in 2008 and I have been grateful ever since. Another treat done well, but not on the menu, at Miyabi is Anago and its sauce.I personally have not had the green tea, but Japanese rumour has it that it is one of the better servings of tea at a restaurant. Toyoko, one of the waitresses, explains that it is actually their own in-house blend.-A: Miyabi might be a design style or description of elegance, but the restaurant needs some sublime character. The mini-TVs have never been on, which is a very good thing, but they overhang the dining area nonetheless. The washroom could withstand some sprucing up and the restaurant’s biggest decoration is commercial beer posters. The Christmas flower pots were nice and not a bad idea as a permanent feature, although why flowers should die for human consumption ‘just because’ is another story.Most dire, however, is the ceiling and upper wall areas. Those need a real scrubbing. That is long overdue. One can easily see the dust when looking up.And oh, the booths are underutilized. -T: The food can be slow and often is at Miyabi. The kitchen regularly delivers the enokimaki, which is an appetizer, after the main meal. Happily, it still fits. At least, the wait is alleviated through the assumption that the roll is freshly prepared and cooked.More direly, the sushi chef works alone and with 14 or so tables in the restaurant he does get busy. The wait for fish can be up to one full hour at times. Another time-related issue at Miyabi is the parking. Jubilee Square is riddled with restaurants and finding a spot to park is often difficult. Parking in the back might be a solution.-S: The service is kind at Miyabi. Toyoko (whose husband works at Toshi in Toronto), Akiko ‘May’, Akemi and Umi are attentive, and ocasionally friendly. Water or tea is quickly refilled and, if things are delayed, they will update you. Nice people. The chef is not talkative or too social, but given how busy he is it is unsurprising. There used to be an older substitute chef, as well as a young female apprentice, but they have not been around for a while. One time, I watched him not once look up at a little Japanese girl who repeatedly climbed the chairs at his bar, between return trips to the table she shared with her mother who kept calling her back for another sushi, to stare at close quarters at the chefs handiwork. The chef (Seiko Arasaki) not once looked up or glanced at the girl who repeatedly climbed the chairs with hands on the counter. How he managed to consciously ignore the young customer climbing up and down his bar for over 30 minutes could possible only be explained owing to sushi chef discipline (smiling). That said, chef Arasaki is contextually my favourite among his colleagues in the Toronto area. He is from Okinawa (hint: Kill Bill).Their being Japanese, at a Japanese restaurant, can obviously work against them too. On a recent visit a group of four or five walked in, proceeded to speak to the waitress in Chinese, began sitting down when the waitress shook her head and in English explained she doesn’t speak Chinese. The group promptly got up and walked out. The waitress shook her head. The patrons were either assuming an authentic Japanese restaurant would be expensive or possibly desired service in their native tongue.Here is his condensed story. The man grew up in Okinawa with mother often absent from the house. She was employed full-time. So the young man began preparing food and cooking for himself until he actually became fond of the art. Jobs were scarce on the small island of Okinawa and when the man’s brother and sister moved away to Osaka the chef also moved, but to the Tokyo area where he obtained a job welding oil tankers. He had attended technical high school. Yet, when the industry slowed down due to an oil crisis he loses the position and moves back to Osaka. In the meantime, his sister and brother-in-law had moved to Canada and were inviting the future chef to relocate as well, as Arasaki was at chef school fulfilling his older love. So he moved to Canada in 1984 on a one-year work visa and worked at a sushi restaurant – including several visa extensions courtesy of his sponsor Keiichi Masuda of Mikado – where he worked for seven years. The bulk of Arasaki’s training came courtesy of Itamae Kaji of the venerable Sushi Kaji. At that time, Kaji was running one of his several pre-Sushi Kaji restaurants, this one on Yonge And King, where he had also trained and coached Mikado’s chef and owner, Keiichi Masuda. Back then, that is initially, Masuda was a chef trained in French cooking and other Western food.Miyabi was opened with a Chinese lady friend in 1994 and is still going strong. The previous co-owner sold her share and moved to Yonge & Front for the short-lived Megumi. Happily, Miyabi lives on.
Mostly authentic but not much atmosphere. Here’s a Japanese restaurant hidden away in a big Chinese plaza. The chef is Japanese and food mostly authentic albeit Japanese pizza (Okonomiyaki which you can probably cook up better one). The food is mostly what you can find in some restaurants in Japan so you are looking for authentic one, this may be it. Two others I can think of is Katsura and Ematei, which you can take any Japanese persons.Often people talk about authentic in Japanese restaurant by pointing out they have this food or that but that’s not really it as it’s little things that counts like presentation and having Daikon-oroshi with your tempura or fish should covering over rice fullly (meaning there should never be so much rice that rice is visible). Few things are wrong here as well. Salad is often disappointing and their tsukemono appears come right from those that you can buy at a Japanese grocery store but overall this place comes much closer to Japanese restaurant than other slick and cool looking fusion joints.
Not just raw fish. I’ll admit, I’m a Japanese cuisine fanatic, and this place hits the spot. Miyabi sits humbly, almost in the back corner of a plaza with other Asian restaurants competing for your appetites. And if you’re in the area (heck, even if you’re not), and are craving Japanese don’t let yourself be lured by Wasabi’s AYCE option! Yes, yes the sushi here is good and fresh and all of those wonderful things, but I feel in recent years sushi has stolen a lot of the spotlight away from more humble Japanese staples. The takoyaki here is delicious, as is the pork curry! All of the warm food offerings on the menu are absolutely delicious and comforting. Intimate atmosphere, but still maintains being family friendly; and yes, definitely bring the kids to try this one!
Miyabi eh?. Took a young girl from work to Miyabi (all these sushi places sound the same) and was out to impress her as she is a cool popular chick at work and is total young girl. She has been saying for weeks that she likes food from Japan which is made of raw fish (oh my) and rice in small size proportional to Oriental people.Cutting to the meat took her here because it was expensive but not too expensive apparently and wanted to see if we can take it to the next level with having left a notable impression on this young thing.Anyhow, the food is awful as predicted. She ordered a box of fish and rice and salad and I went with the salmon. The proportions were minscule, the sauce has a tangy flavour and above all there was not enough food. She enjoyed hers tho, but no kiss. The afternoon was spent mullig over how The Keg would have impressed said lady more. Still, got me in her good books so two stars.