Place a bit small so it's always crowded. But the food and service is great. Best sushi in town!
If you want great sushi, this is the place! A lot better than many of the headline grabbing places!
aswsome food. great service very fresh highly recommended.
Best reasonable price sushi in GVA. Go in the middle of the week for dinner before they run out of fish.
It’s been a year or two since my first visit to Shima-Ya Sushi. It’s run by a Japanese couple. They’re a bit hidden but London Drugs is your best landmark. Hours. Closed on Monday and Tuesday. We dropped in on a Friday evening (around 7:30pm) and it was surprisingly not too busy. It did randomly pick up and get busy half an hour later. It’s a small, 20 seater (four tables and 8 seats at the sushi bar). Service is friendly and our green tea was constantly refilled throughout our meal.
Their sushi and sashimi are so fresh. It just feels like I'm eating in japan! Cannot resist everytime I drive by - I always have to come in for lunch! Yummy!
Love the seafood chawamushi, it tastes even better than one at Isami. The portion is smaller but it has so much flavour. My husband gushes over the flavour. The spicy scallop roll is really good and very fresh. Just a bit disappointed that it is not spicy at all. We also had the three kind assorted sashimi and house special dynamite roll. The dynamite roll is really good and prawn they use is big and very fresh and good quality. The salmon sashimi and scallop sashimi are really good and fresh. Their salmon sashimi is one of the best I've taste anywhere. They use very good quality rice here so it makes the sushi roll tastes really delicious. We also love Mai dai kama sakamushi which is the steamed Japanese fish with sake. The fish meat is fatty and very soft and tastes delicious. It comes with vinegar dipping sauce. The price for sashimi is bit high and the portion is smaller than other restaurants but all the food we taste here are really good with high quality and are very fresh.
Shima-Ya was highly recommended by one set of friends and not by another, so we decided to visit it ourselves. Overall we enjoyed the food put out in front of us. The food was worth the price. However, I was a bit disappointed in the ratio of rice to fish in both the Battera and the nigiri. For the nigiri, I basically just kept eating half the amount of rice. The amount of wasabi spread onto the nigiri was quite good though. We don't think we will return simply because we had a really great experience at Isami, who also had much better prices.
You get what you pay for. This place is a little more pricey than others on Victoria Drive but the quality and taste of the food is far superior. The staff are really nice too :).
This place looks ordinary and doesn't offer good looking gimmicky dishes that popular joints downtown and izakayas provide (which are awesome food too by the way). What it has instead are solid old school classics. It's not "just" sushi by any accounts.
Pure goodness!. Read all the reviews and totally agreed with them. Good thing we went early, small place, excellent food and service. I'm still drooling for more. No fancy decors or crazy menu.
Little Gem of a Place. I would highly recommend the Alaska Don or Omakase sets for those who enjoy a great selection of fresh sashimi. The Alaska Don't is my favorite. It comes complete with set Giant Scallops, Amaebi, Fresh Uni, Squid, Ikura fish roe. The sweetness from the sashimi blends so perfectly with the creamy uni and ikura. So good that I had it two days in a row ;)
Summary: For a place like this skips the rolls and go for the specialty sashimi.
Authentic Japanese delight. Small shop, but the food is delicious here. highly recommend this place as a stop for anyone wanting to try really great food at a very reasonable price! I don't write a lot of reviews, but I will mention that the omakaze was incredible. Fish didn't feel frozen, and the portion size of each fish was crazy on the sushi.
The food: hamachi was buttery, toro was fatty, the entire collection is to die for!
Don't miss out!
Delicious!. Very good sushi, and very good customer service.
Not your average sushi joint. This place is wonderful. Hand made everything and chef have over 40+ years under the knife. I think it is one of the top sushi restaurant we had ever tried in Vancouver. It might be our everyday go-to place from now on. Their sushi is fresh and taste is awesome. They are not specialize in good looking sushi rolls, if that's the kind of stuff you're looking for. They are not fast food sushi, where you can come in and go in half an hour. This is a nice place to take a couple people and enjoy what the chef can do. They make very good nigiri, so I would suggest go try some of their nigiri for sure. I think it is best to bring your love one there for dinner and sit infront of the sushi bar, then order two dozen nigiri between the two of you with a side roll or an appy.
Top Five. I'm not Japanese, but I grew up around sushi chefs and have had the fundamentals of quality Japanese food ingrained into me since I was young. Shima-ya is one of those restaurants that we are lucky to have in Vancouver that provides its customers with those same fundamentals. The quality of rice, the preparation and temperature of the fish, and the size is all what I look for in sushi. Good sushi chefs pay attention to small details—for example, the miso soup here is delicious and balanced, same with their rice. Come here if you're looking for the real deal; this tiny sushi restaurant is probably one of the five best in the city.
This is a place with quality. One of my favourite places. It's on the slightly more expensive side compare to sushi joints, but it's on a whole different category. If you know how to tell from what's quality sushi this is the place. The sashimi and fresh and handled with skills.
Abc_sesame_street_98
+4.5
Best Sushi Place in Lower Mainland. I've been to many sushi places throughout the lower mainland. This is by far the best sushi place ever! The fish is always fresh. The chef takes time to make sure your sushi is perfect. If it doesn't look good, he will not send it out! The best part is the rice they use. I don't know how they prepare their rice but it is perfect.
I'm really surprised there are no line ups. At the same time, I'm glad there are no line ups.
One for sushi purists, this little hole in the wall on Victoria serves up beautifully prepared generously proportioned sashimi and nigiri. No fried tempura in sight! Just DELICIOUS. HIGHLY recommended!
WOW. Best sushi i've ever had in my life, no lies - this place is truly authentic. If I was balling, I would fly Vancouver weekly just to eat there.
One of the best sushi places in Vancouver.. I went into this little restaurant not expecting much - little did I know this was a hole-in-the-wall gem. I was surprised that they serve chawan-mushi, so I ordered it, and it was perfect. It is difficult to make a good chawan-mushi, and just as difficult to find a place that serve it in Vancouver. At that point this place won me over. The BBQ mackerel was the best I've had in Vancouver - juicy and grilled just right. I chatted with the owners and they told me that he had been a sushi chef in the Meguro district of Tokyo for more than 40 years. That explained everything.
Delicious, the freshest sushi. So fresh I didn't feel the need for soy and the spicy sauce was actually spicy. I even ventured and tried their mozuku-su salad which was pleasantly sour complimented with thinly sliced cucumber
Great Authentic Sushi. I absolutely love this place and it is the go to restaurant when I have a sushi craving. Best part is hubby loves it too! He is very picky with his sushi quality. It is a very small restaurant that fits about 4 or 5 tables plus the sushi bar chairs. We usually order take out. The quality is very good and the portions are what sushi should be. I hate sushi rolls that have too much rice! I have to take that rice out. The sashimi is very good quality too. As another mentioned, it is rare to see authentic Japanese owners. A very sweet couple, but I do find the Mrs. a bit slow and difficult to understand.
Best sushi I had in Vancouver. Been there no less than five times. Every time is pleasant
It's a little pricy if you compare it to other sushi places. But it worth every penny!!
I've never had sushi better than this resturant before or after
The Best Sushi in Vancouver. If you want to have the best sushi in Vancouver at reasonable pricing, This is the place to go.
Authentic. It's normally a good sign when the staff at a Vancouver sushi joint are actually Japanese. But it can also mean that the sushi may be a bit different then what some Vancouverites have come to expect. True sushi is supposed to be bite sized, not the "value" size a lot of Korean-run joints feature. Fortunately, the sushi at Shima-Yu is not overly small, but it is made with fresh quality ingredients. My dynamite roll and chopped scallop roll were a little too loosely wrapped, but was otherwise tasty. Prices could be cheaper considering the competition.
Shima-ya holds a special place in my heart. While there are quite a few Japanese restaurants in GVRD that I’d gladly recommend to my friends, few compare to the exquisite quality and elegance that I’ve stumbled upon in Japan. A good friend of mine recommended Shima-ya when I suggested
The closest I’ll probably ever come to dining at Sukiyabashi Jiro’s restaurant in Japan, I ain’t even mad that I spent $31 on ten pieces of Nigiri and one Miso Soup.
Okay, yes it stings a little but this is what happens when two bloggers come together on a Wednesday night – things start to get a little outta control and decisions are made that can’t be unmade.
Bamboozling is the only real way to coerce someone into being your friend and after several long weeks, I got him. The poor sucker never even saw it coming.
Some fresh scallops, shrimps, kohada, and tai in a bowl.
I always like nigiri sushi. Really glad that we found another nice sushi restaurant.
Fell in love with the saba at this place.
While a lot of us (myself included) live in the suburbs, when it comes to dining out, we miss a lot of places just because they are out of the way. In the case of Vancouver, most popular restaurants are
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