Torarenbo is one of our favourite sushi place in Richmond along side Kiyo and Sushi House. It’s one of our regular lunch joints that we alternate between. Torarenbo, or T-Bo for short has a great lunch special with good quality food. It’s located in what is probably best known as the Happy Date plaza on Park and Buswell.
Their lunch special is a Japanese style lunch box with a variety of different choices for the ‘main’ dish. As usual, they it includes a miso soup. I’ve never really been able to tell the difference between miso soups, so, T-Bo’s miso soup is as usual, quite good!
The T-Bo lunch box comes with the usual suspects: sushi, tempura, main dish, rice, fruit and salad. What makes T-Bo so good is that the portions are good, and the quality is better than a lot of Japanese places in Richmond.
The sushi comes in the form of 2 california rolls, a salmon maki, tuna maki, and a cucumber roll; and that’s a lot of sushi, considering that its just the side dish. The maki/rolls are good. They aren’t out of this world, but they’re consistently what you’d expect good sushi to be.
The combo box also comes with tempura. There are always two shrimp tempura and a mix of veggie tempura, usually carrot, sweet potato, or zucchini. The tepmura continues to add to the awesomeness of this lunch special. T-Bo also has a regular ‘assorted’ tempura dish, but you only get about twice as much, and it costs $7 bucks.. that’s almost the price of the entire lunch combo!
The veggie tempura is fairly standard, and quite good. Prawn tempura at Japanese restaurants can be a hit or miss.. sometimes they’re big, and juicy, but sometimes they’re small and soft, or just exactly taste like prawn tempura should. T-Bo, however, good prawn tempura. The prawn tempura is a very reasonable size, and most importantly, they taste good!
T-Bo has a few options for the ‘main dish’ of the lunch box. We usually get chicken teriyaki, beef teriyaki, or chicken karrage. I highly recommend the chicken karrage if you haven’t had it before at T-Bo. Actually, the chicken karrage is so good that since I got it the first time, I don’t think I’ve bothered to try anything else!
The chicken karrage is completely boneless (they serve it without the wing), and has very little cartilage. Most importantly, it tastes good! I’m not exactly sure when they do differently, but it has a slightly different flavor than normal karrage.
One of my co workers got the beef teriyaki.. he said it was quite good.. So we snapped some pics
Danny got the chicken teriyaki. He said that it was a good size, and was also quite tasty. The main dishes also come with a small salad. The salad is a relatively normal Japanese salad.. i usually eat it if I can fit it in after the rest of my box.
In addition to the awesome lunch box special, T-Bo has a few signature rolls. The first one is the Mango California Roll. I know they aren’t the first place to do a mango cali roll, but its definitely very good. It has a perfect balance between the sweet mango and the salty sushi. Danny mentioned the California rolls that he tried in the Philippines would replace the avocado with mango instead. He thinks its because mango is cheaper than avocado. He definitely is not a stanger to the taste and likes the sweetnes and tanginess of the mango in the roll.
The mango cali roll is, more or less, as you’d expect, a california roll, with sliced mango and some fish roe on top. However we noticed the the cali roll used is not exactly a regular cali roll. Instead of using seaweed to roll the sushi, they used a type of bean curd based wrap (it’s then thin yellow layer in the picture). This was an excellent change to the seaweed because it has far less taxture than the seaweed. When you eat the mango cali roll, you can barely feel what’s holding it together, which make’s the flavours that much more prominent.
T-Bo’s other signature roll is appropriately called the ‘Torarenbo Roll’. I think it’s safe to say that you might not have a roll like this at another sushi restaurant. The Torarenbo Roll consists of Tuna and what seems like tempura batter pieces that add an nice crunchy texture. On top, it has a slice of avocado, and a dab of salsa. At first, it sounds strange to have salsa with your sushi, but after trying it, it has become one of my favorite rolls! If you go to T-Bo (and you should), you should definitely give the Torarenbo Roll a try!
Five Loaves Rating:
Value: 8/10
Quality: 8/10
Overall: 8/10
Verdict: A great sushi place in Richmond with an awesome lunch special and great signature rolls.
Tags: karaage, lunch special, mango california roll, sashimi, sushi, torarenbo roll
