Travel Food Tuesday - Ponshu Review

Sushi falls flat

Visited this restaurant in Calgary almost 5 months ago. Maybe it changed since but I wasn’t too fond of it. 

Started off with some popular appetizers. There was the Sea of Japan Ceviche where I only wanted it for the gram, it’s presented in a glass and comes out smokinnnnn (prounounced like the Mask, do people know what the Mask is? Am i really old? Yes is the answer). However, the flavor wasn’t too smokin at all, it had some decent but very small pieces of scallops, shrimp, salmon, tuna, octopus and salmon caviar (which is just roe but apparently, you can upcharge something if it has caviar in it *eyeroll*). Dish is basically all presentation.

Also had the chicken karaage which was pretty oily and nothing more than a Japanese chicken nugget here, Texture wasn’t crisp at all and the chicken tasted dull. 

Ordered some pressed sushi as well. The first impression of them is that they were pretty small. We had the aburi salmon and negi toro pressed sushi. The salmon had a creamy sauce which made it taste ok, while the toro had some wasabi soy for a better flavor in my opinion. What’s interesting is that the chef here apparently is from Miku in Vancouver. Where I loathe the sushi there and the pressed sushi was terrible. So having this just gave me flashbacks of paying for the oceanside location prices at Miku. 

Also had some spot prawns which were small as hell, but they deep fried the heads so all was well. I’m seriously gonna research the difference between prawns and shrimp because I swear some places are charging prawn price for a shrimp. One of these prawns were 6 bucks...pretty pricy for sure. 
Forgot we had the Stone Plated 6oz AAA steak and for $22 it was not worth it. Nothing about the steak was special in anyway. I’ll stick to the Shokunin for steak prepared in the appropriate Japanese way.

Overall the service here was garbage tier. Seemed like during the pandemic they were insistent on packing the entire restaurant then even getting us some water. Will probably never come back here so don’t be fooled by their social media.

Sal says: Just Skip It (2.6/5)

Tracey says: I thought the place was pretty clean... The fish tasted pretty fresh; flavours were good but not amazing. The shrimp thing was very mediocre haha. Portions were def small, especially the pressed compared to dorinku as u had mentioned lol. I didn’t really care for the yuzu drink either but also I usually only like alcohol that doesn’t taste like alcohol. Service was subpar, they were friendly enough but didn’t even offer water and dude ignored my first water request haha