Hime Japanese Restaurant review

315 Broadway E
Vancouver, BC V5T 1W5
(Mount Pleasant neighbourhood)

My first restaurant review on this blog! It's not going to be very extensive, but it's definitive: I heartily recommend Hime Japanese Restaurant in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

Hime is near my workplace and I was initially a little leery. I'd gone to another neighbourhood Japanese restaurant and although it was cheap, it was definitely not good quality. I'm one of those racist restaurant goers: my impression of "authenticity" of a restaurant that belongs to a particular country or culture is highly dependent on the # of fellow restaurant goers that I see that belong to the same culture of that restaurant. And everyone else in that first "I'm not going to recommend" restaurant were of the "paler" persuasion. I suppose though, that Mount Pleasant, although it contains a large number of artsy hipsters, does not contain its fair share of Asians, artsy hipsters or not.

Anyways, I've gone on a segue. But I'll just say that Hime does not contain a large # of Asian customers, but Hime has proved my racist stereotyping wrong! It was good! Reasonably priced and good presentation as well, which are two things that usually don't go together. I ordered a special scallop roll, which consisted of a regular scallop roll on the bottom and a sort of spicy scallop salad on top. The scall0ps were nice, fresh, and plump.

I also don't usually care about customer service if the food is good, but in this case, the customer service was pretty much icing on the cake. A hearty hello as I came in the door, tea filled at regular intervals, a "so how is the food?" inquiry, a hearty goodbye as I left.

I also noticed, interestingly, that although it seemed like the restaurant was owned by Koreans and had Korean waitresses, one of the sushi chefs was Japanese. One of the waitresses seemed able to speak both Korean and Japanese, and the other waitress spoke to the chef in English. In addition, a customer came and sat at the bar. He was Chinese, but spoke with an obvious familiarity with the waitresses and sushi chefs in the language that they all knew: English. I felt a little warm and fuzzy - not because of the conquering dominance of English as the lingua franca - but because it seemed like such a show of community and differing cultures getting along, etc. Especially since I had written an article for Ricepaper way back when bemoaning the racist attitudes I had seen among some Chinese, Japanese and Korean people when I had been an international student in Beijing. That's another segue for another day.

The yelp reviews of Hime are located here.