Shove the Fish Into My Face

Sushi feels like one of those meals just about everyone can agree to. There was a time a while back where the thought of eating raw fish grossed people out, but it feels like sushi hit this point where suddenly everyone was on board and people automatically just started loving it. Now it feels like a new sushi place crops up almost as often as a new coffee joint, and most places are hopping spots on any given weekend. We’ve truly entered a time where “ew, raw fish” isn’t even part of the conversation anymore.

That’s a bit of an aside to my article today, but I realized I was just taking it on faith that people liked sushi and, well, that wasn’t always the case. But it certainly felt like that was just a given going into Heart Sushi in London, Ontario. When we went there, an hour before the restaurant was set to close for a break between the lunch period and their dining hours, the place was still packed, with tables full of people and a general drone of noise as everyone in the place was talking and having a good time. A place that busy, at that time of day, seems almost strange, and yet I think that’s just how this place is all the time.

Heart Sushi is one of a couple of all-you-can-eat sushi spots in that city, and it’s the larger one by far. The setup should seem pretty self-explanatory, especially to anyone that has done other all-you-can-eat activities in the current era (like hot pot). You go in, get a table, and get handed a tablet with the full available menu on it. Make your selections, send the order in, and wait for your food to arrive. Refill as often as you want, but since it’s all-you-can-eat there is an expectation that you will make a good faith effort to eat everything you order (otherwise you will get charged extra for waste). Go at it until you’re fat and sassy.

Heart Sushi has a solid, if not necessarily creatively original, selection. You’ll get the usual appetizers, like tempura and rangoons (although for some reason not a single place in London, ON serves crab rangoons, just cheese-filled ones, which is a strange bit of culture shock), soups, like miso and egg drop, and a standard mix of sushi rolls (both basic and specialty) as well as a full kitchen of Asian fusion dishes, so you can get curries and noodle dishes alongside the usual sushi fare, which is nice to see.

For this particular visit I started with a hit at their garden bar to grab a few lighter options before the food arrived. I picked out a few pieces of melon (which were fresh and crisp although not particularly flavorful) along with small scoops of their seaweed and seafood salads. The seaweed salad was tasty, with a tangy sesame dressing on it that I really enjoyed. The star, though, was that seafood salad which was made with real crab (no fake stuff) and lightly tossed in a creamy dressing. I got a few bites of it and it was sweet and tangy… and then my wife stole the rest of it. I can’t blame her.

From here the sushi started arriving, and there was a lot that the group I was with ordered. The central selection was what we called the “bomb squad selection”. When they’ve gone to other sushi places they like to “Battle Tiamat”, where they order all the “dragon” rolls on the menu, whatever the place has, and eat through all of them. Heart doesn’t have dragon rolls, but they did have three “dynamite” rolls on their menu for lunch, the regular Dynamite, the Green Dynamite, and the Red Dynamite, so we ordered those and attempted to be explosives experts.

I won’t lie, this was a mistake. Not because it was too much food but because I honestly didn’t think these rolls were that great. Each is a shrimp tempura roll with slightly different toppings, making for a very same-y feeling series of rolls. The one that I would have loved to have the most, the Black Dynamite, which is wrapped in barbeque eel, wasn’t even on the lunch menu at all, so what we got were rolls that were topped with avocado, avocado and mango sauce, and salmon. The Red Dynamite, which had the salmon on it, was the best of the lot, but they were all underwhelming in general.

I much preferred my spicy salmon roll, which had some kick to it and was far tastier. The table also got a few of the weirder items, like sushi pizza, which is a bit of fish served with mayo on top of a bit of tempura potato. These were snatched up before I got to sample one, and I was too full to order another round, but it did at least look interesting. I find it fun when sushi places try outside the box ideas, and this certainly qualifies.

I did get a beef curry dish, just so I could try one of their hot asian items. The curry was sweet and lightly spiced, certainly not nearly as hot as I would expect from something with a hot pepper icon on the menu (although I will admit that, outside the hot sauce festival I visited, I’ve never really found the “spicy” food in Canada to be all that spicy, but maybe I’m just not eating at the right joints). This was a tasty bit of food, though, so if I go back to Heart Sushi again at some point (on another rare trip up to London, ON) I’ll likely try and explore a few other of their hot Asian items for a better sense of their cooking.

We finished off the meal with tiny deserts, and I sampled both a mango pudding and a tiramisu. The mango pudding was fine, not too sweet and almost maybe a little watery. The tiramisu was better, although its bottom layer was a hard bit of crust, and not a soft lady finger, which made getting the tiny slide of cake out of its serving cup quite difficult. Its flavor was solid, though, and I could have easily downed another two or three of them if the restaurant hadn’t already done their last call on food.

Food eaten, and kitchen wrapping up, we went to the front and paid. All told, for two of us eating there, the whole meal was $62 CAD plus tip, which isn’t really bad for sushi in general. My wife and I pay that much when we go out for a la carte sushi, and that’s in USD. This meal felt cheap by comparison, and for more food than we normally get.

It was a solid selection, with fresh, tasty fish items. All-you-can-eat does tend to simplify flavors down to please the masses, and I could certainly see that with the dynamite rolls that we got, but the simpler flavors were at least backed up by high quality ingredients. Not everything was my specific cup of tea, but for a fun meal in a group setting, Heart Sushi had enough stuff that it did right that I’d be willing to go back.

At dinner time. So I can get that Black Dynamite roll. I need that eel.