https://sushiyokicanovas.es/index.php
https://sushiyokicanovas.es/index.php
We continue our hunt for a sushi restaurant in Valencia that offers the perfect balance of great food, delicious fresh-tasting seafood, service and price. Oh, and the rice. The rice is everything. This is not to diminish the importance of the seafood but the fish is the easier part. Rice is hard.
Rice is very hard.
Sushi Yoki is a charming little restaurant (we visited the one in the Gran Via neighborhood). There is café seating on the sidewalk with the inside being very cozy. The decor is bright and cheerful with something of a view of the kitchen but there’s no traditional sushi bar to sit at (as with almost all sushi restaurants in Spain).
Starting with a flight of nigiri the dishes are beautiful and all with a little bit of garnish — edible flowers, fruit, microgreens and the like.
We started with the mackerel. It is good, albeit a little bit dry. The portion of fish is smaller than their other sushi. The eel is a better choice and is moist and succulent, however, eel is usually brushed with unagi sauce. While the eel is good it is a bit bland as a result of not being served with any sauce.
As far as nigiri is concerned, the better choices are the salmon or tuna. Both are much more tender and less dry with the salmon tasting very fresh. The tuna is tender and buttery. The wasabi comes through nicely without being overwhelming in both nigiri while there is little of the spicy flavor in the other two nigiri.
Good but a bit inconsistent so we moved on to the maki rolls.
The tuna and avocado maki roll with wasabi tobiko is a very good roll. It is as billed, salmon and avocado in a maki roll with nori and rice. Simple, however, this, and the other rolls are let down by the addition of cream cheese. This is so common in Spain and is so distracting from the flavor of the other ingredients — nori, seafood, rice, etc.
We sampled a similar roll with black tobiko that is better with the umami flavor really coming through.
The two other maki we ordered included the Rainbow Roll with crab stick and avocado topped with salmon, dorado and tobiko as well as a second simple shrimp and avocado roll.
The Rainbow Roll is very good and the fake crab was actually some of the better we have tasted. The shrimp and avocado roll was also tasty with super fresh shrimp and avocado. It was topped with sesame seeds that brought a nice toasted flavor to the roll.
With both rolls there is the ever-present and unnecessary cream cheese. It is smart to just ask them to leave it off.
There are some oddities. One is the fruit served with the nigiri and maki. This was most often a half of a blueberry but might be a raspberry. It looks a bit decorative but is just a distraction from the sushi.
The star of the show is the spicy tuna gunkan. The spice level in the tuna is really great with the tuna tasting very fresh but not overwhelmed by the spiciness.
This is good sushi.
It is not, however, great sushi because the rice is not great. It borders on being undercooked and is a bit dry. It is hard to pinpoint but it may be that we had day-old rice or that it is not very well cooked. One taster described it as “tight”. This is a let down from what is otherwise very good technical sushi.
Rice is, after all, very hard.