Today, Anthony and I went to a somewhat new Japanese restaurant called Take Sento. It is located on Alexandra Road in Richmond, by Kam Do.

First impressions: The inside is decorated very nicely. On one side there is a big Japanese-style rooms with those rice paper sliding doors. They require you to take off your shoes and have slippers provided. Being a new restaurant, the slippers was a nice touch, but then who would really want to wear them when everyone’s smelly feet has been in there. Chopsticks, napkins, plates, soy sauce dishes were already on the table when we arrived, which was a nice touch since we don’t have to wait for the server to get these things for us.

Menu: They focused their menu on sashimi, robata and rolls. They did not have a lot of special appetizers, just the usual gommae, sunomono. They did have a garlic butter clam pot (which I will try next time); it didn’t seem like an appetizer to me but I guess they didn’t know where else to put it. They had a wide variety of robata as well as rolls to choose from. There were around  3 or 4 special rolls and the rest were what you can find at any other Japanese restaurant, but their rolls are made with real crab meant. With regards to price, it wasn’t too expensive, but not cheap either-what you would find at any other Japanese tapas in Richmond.

First, we had the Mango with Real Crab Meat roll and the Sky Roll-Aburi Duck Breast. (Aburi means partly grilled and partly raw).

The Mango Roll had mango sauce drizzled on top of it which had a strong mango flavour and not too sweet, so it went well with the roll. I could definitely taste the real crab meat which of course tasted a lot better than the imitation crab. What was surprising to me was that they also added a bit of crab meat between the mango and the roll itself. This dish was $12.00.

The Sky Roll had a piece of partly raw duck breast on the top of the roll and partly grilled duck breast inside the roll. Although it had a bit of smoky flavour, I would have liked some sort of savoury sauce drizzled on top just to bring all the flavours together. It was a unique dish to try out (who would’ve though putting duck breast in a roll). The duck was really tender by itself, but when eaten as a whole, there wasn’t much flavour. This dish was $13.00.

Alright, next we had the Farm Roll-Beef Aburi. This time, the beef was only on top of the roll and not inside, which made the roll a bit boring. Again, the beef was really flavourful, but as a whole, it wasn’t enough overpower the bland asparagus and cucumbers inside. Although you can’t see it, but underneath the green onion, there was a tiny blob of spicy and super salty sauce. I’m guessing it is made out of some sort of pepper like a Jalapeno. I didn’t really like this $11.00 roll that much, but Anthony did.

We weren’t quite full after those rolls, so we decided to order a yakitori cheese ($3.95)and soft shell crab ($6.95). The yakitori cheese was really good, especially with the small seaweed flakes sprinkled on top. To me, they weren’t really worth $4 and they did take a long time to come out though. Not sure if this is the reason why, but we got these frozen grapes at the end. They were like frozen blueberries, but grapes. Pretty delicious, so I might try it at home sometime.

This is actually my first time eating soft shell crab…and I thought I wasn’t supposed to eat the shell.. like any other crab. It was actually really flavourful and the batter wasn’t too heavy. This came with a dipping sauce but we didn’t really need to use it since the crab already had enough seasoning.

Overall, it was a nice little place, but I think I would prefer Koto Izakaya. I would come back though, just to try the other items. Our bill came to about $57 including tax and tips, which is quite expensive for 2 people, but I guess we did order a lot.