Organic and local foods are used as much as possible at all locations but the clincher is the price — $13.88 for all you can eat
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Diners cooking their meal at their table at Posh on West Broadway. Photograph by : Steve Bosch, Vancouver Sun
Sukiyaki is like the William Shatner of food. It almost disappeared off the radar and now it’s trying for a comeback career, at least in the Lower Mainland.
Peter Leung, a marketing guy, and Tony Kuo, a restaurateur, are betting on it to the tune of some seven restaurants specializing in just this one Japanese dish. They’ll all be called Posh — three are up and running and another four will open in the next year, including one on the North Shore and another in Coquitlam.
The two men combine skill sets — Leung’s marketing saavy and Kuo’s experience in offering good-value Asian food. Kuo operates the mod and popular Vogue restaurant in Richmond. Posh, too, is in a modern setting and servers, from the way I saw it, have been told to make nice with customers. The clincher, though, is the really great deal — it’s all-you-can-eat sukiyaki for $13.88. Posh uses organic and local foods as much as possible. And there’s nothing else to order, even if you wanted to. (They will be adding miso soup, a starter and dessert in the future.)
It’s not exactly the sukiyaki of yore you might have watched sizzle before you in a tatami room on Powell Street back in the 1970s, where broth, noodles, paper-thin beef and veggies were nestled in an iron pan, and cooked in front of you.
That was Tokyo-style sukiyaki. Over Osaka way, they add the broth and ingredients at the table and that’s the Posh way, too. The pot is deeper and more hotpot like.
I can’t say this style offers a neat-freak approach to eating. By meal’s end, our table was strewn with the flotsam and jetsam of our meal as it voyaged from raw plate to cooking pan to dinner plate to a dip to the mouth.
The pan starts off with a handful of shredded Chinese cabbage (for its sweetness) but beyond that you check off your choice of ingredients from a list of some 27 items. Do, do, do include meat (beef or pork). It will add much flavour to the broth, which is diluted sweetened soy. Leung says the sweetener isn’t sugar (the Japanese use sugar and mirin) and will only say the sweetness is from organic fruit.
The broth comes in two teapots, one with a concentrated broth and another with water to dilute. Diners also get a raw pasteurized egg. Stop yourself from adding it to the sukiyaki because you break it into a bowl, mix it up and dip the cooked sukiyaki into it before eating.
Items on the order sheet include Asian veggies, shiitake and button mushrooms, bean curd, onions, pumpkin, rice cake, taro, yam, konnyaku (a potato-like veg) vermicelli, bean sprouts, spinach and tomato. (The broth gets tastier and tastier as the meal progresses.) The konnyaku contains a lot of calcium, which can toughen meat, so I’ve heard it’s advisable to separate it from the meat. You can also order udon noodles to join the sukiyaki pan and it’s a good idea to leave that to the end to soak up the liquid.
The first Posh opened in Richmond about a year ago. The West Broadway location opened in November and Burnaby opened just last week. The rooms are graphically bold with red booths and black faux marble table tops. A private area includes karaoke, music videos and a private server. Servers are young and English-speaking.
Posh is named for its swank connotation and not for the Spice Girl. It’s an acronym for “port out, starboard home” indicating the best rooms in ships sailing from England to India (the best views were on port side departing from England and on starboard, returning). In Chinese, it has the same kind of meaning, Leung says.
And speaking of meanings, sukiyaki means “to like” and “grill” in Japanese. At one time in the Osaka region, the meat was grilled first, then put into the broth. In other words, sukiyaki is an etymological relic.
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POSH
Overall: 3
Food: 3
Ambience: 3
Service: 3 1/2
Price: $
1788 West Broadway, 604-737-7674; 1123 — 3779 Sexsmith Rd., Richmond, 604-303-7674; 105 — 6462 Kingsway, Burnaby, 604-434-7674. All are open for lunch and dinner, 7 days a week.
Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone. Restaurants are rated out of five stars.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008