#2137-3779 Sexsmith Road
Richmond, BC

Gyo-O is located right across from Pearl Castle.  I keep passing it and have wanted to try it out for a long time.  My friend recommended that I try their sashimi so I was very excited to try it.  I love Japanese food.  

Upon entering the restaurant I noticed all the writing on the Japanese writing on the walls.  This place is authentic Japanese and service is very friendly.  It isn’t very big so this isn’t the place for big groups.  The decor is very unique and interesting, but I really wish I could read some of these things written on the walls.

Upon sitting down, we were presented with the menu and we decided on the lunch combo and the assorted sashimi don.  My friend said that the sea urchin here is really fresh and a great value but we both don’t like sea urchin so we didn’t order it.

The lunch combo came with miso soup, octopus balls, mini udon soup, 3 side dishes and an unagi rice bowl with a half-boiled egg.  The miso soup, octopus balls and mini udon were all pretty ordinary.  It tasted like any other and was unsurprising.

As for the three side dishes, there were lotus roots, enokitake and pickled cucumbers.  The lotus roots were crunchy, but didn’t really have any taste to it.  I enjoyed the enokitake because I love these little Japanese mushrooms.  They had a sweet and salty sauce with it.  As for the cucumber, we didn’t finish it because it was too sour.

Out of this whole combo, the best dish was the unagi (eel) rice bowl with half boiled egg.  I think the egg made the whole entire dish because it mixed really well with the rest of the dish.  There was a medium sized piece of eel and plenty of sauce.  We enjoyed this rice bowl very much.  However, I’m sure I can buy the pre made Japanese eel at T&T and make this at home myself.

The other rice bowl we had was the assorted sashimi.  It had the same enokitake mushrooms on the side and a bit of green seaweed as well.  There was the typical fish: salmon, tuna, tuna belly, shrimp, octopus….however, there was one I didn’t recognize and it is the one with the white and black skin.  I didn’t have that but Rockia said that it was very different and he didn’t like the texture of the fish.  There was a lot of rice too.  Maybe too much?

I am a big fan of Japanese seafood salad and we ordered the one here to try.  The moment it arrived I was a bit surprised by the corn flakes on top.  As well, the sauce was way to weird for us because it was slimy and made the raw fish in the salad very slimy as well.  This was the first time I left a salad unfinished.  Oh my…..SLIMY!!!!

The sauce was the source of the sliminess.  We asked the waitress what the sauce was but she didn’t really speak English and just said….”umm…soy sauce?”  Haha.  We gave up and just didn’t eat anymore.  I have a good guess that it might have been raw egg….which we couldn’t stand to eat with salad.

Overall impression:

Good

• There is good variety of fresh fish
• It is authentic Japanese
• Nice friendly service although they might not speak too much English

Bad

• The taste of their dishes varies and some are not for the average Japanese eater (ex.  weird salad)
• There was nothing particularly memorable about this place.  It was very average

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