With so many sushi places in the city to choose from ranging from super fresh and traditional sushi through to quick pre-made lunch sushi, it's sometimes hard to differentiate sushi except in quality or variety of product. This is where Iku Sushi has gone out and done something different with the Cheeseburger and Chicken cheeseburger sushi (see below).
Iku Sushi recently opened its doors in the new 140 William Street complex at the underground train station in Perth. The decor at Iku Sushi is quite hip for a lunch bar type of venue. Filled with lots of colour, and modern looking Japanese inspired decorations Iku Sushi looks like a place to go and see what the fuss is all about. They've definitely created a hip looking lunch bar.
Menu-wise, Iku Sushi has offerings ranging from machine wrapped sushi through to rice meals and noodles. All these are served in quite fitting (to match the interior) colourful and catchy packaging.
Menu-wise, Iku Sushi has offerings ranging from machine wrapped sushi through to rice meals and noodles. All these are served in quite fitting (to match the interior) colourful and catchy packaging.
Chicken Cheeseburger Sushi - $7.50
In my opinion the best tasting meal of our visit, the waiter claimed this as their specialty (well, the "cheeseburger" types of sushi which is the beef version of this sushi).
Take a standard sushi roll with chicken and cheese filling (to make it a chicken cheeseburger), then coat it in batter and deep fry it. Then serve it with some creamy (chilli) spicy mayonnaise. A sushi that differentiates Iku Sushi from many other sushi places, it's just unfortunate that it was a relatively healthy sushi differentiated by deep frying it. It was relatively tasty though for lunch bar sushi.
The batter was relatively light and quite crispy, and overall in some of the sushi pieces where the cheese melted the sushi tasted how I would expect chicken and cheese to be in sushi. Interestingly, they battered the sushi in portions of two such that they could be cut in half, giving it one flat side covered in batter whilst the other side looked like sushi. This maximised the taste and texture of lightly crunchy batter.
Overall, for me this was worthy of a try but whether you like to have your sushi battered and deep fried will be a personal choice.
Spicy Chicken Ramen - $9.95
Coming served in what looked like a colourful supermarket-cup-noodle container, I'm not really sure what to say about this ramen. V.K. ordered this and described it as having a milky soup and didn't enjoy it. I tried a bit of the lightly spicy soup and it was very simple in flavour and lacking the depth and flavour that you get at specialist ramen restaurants.
The serving size was small by many ramen standards (although also a few dollars or so cheaper) and the noodles and chicken were also quite ordinary. The vertical nature of the container also made it a little difficult to eat the ramen like a normal ramen meal.
I guess they don't specialise in ramen.
I guess they don't specialise in ramen.
Chicken Katsu Curry (medium) - $8.95
E.G. ordered this meal sized curry chicken katsu which was served with rice, spring rolls and salad.
Though this was called a chicken katsu, Iku Sushi covered the chicken in a type of thin coating of what seemed more like fine batter than breadcrumbs and lacked crunch and flavour. For those of you that don't know, Japanese Panko is what is normally used to crumb katsu and when used right gives a good crumb coating and a nice crunch. The result was that the chicken katsu was quite ordinary and plain. Also, the texture of the chicken itself was very smooth that made E.G. and I think that it looked and tasted like processed chicken. Odd.
E.G. described the spring rolls (and indeed the meal) as pretty average. The spring rolls were like a mini entree to the dish, loosely packed vegetables in mini rolls and deep fried.
In summary, Iku Sushi breaks with tradition and offers their own take on simple Japanese dishes served in colourful and catchy disposable packaging. Though innovation is definitely welcome, I can't say that I enjoyed the experience as many dishes didn't appeal to me - even comparing against the traditional versions. A shame since the concept seems quite unique.
Points to note: Iku Sushi is a bit like a funky lunch bar with sushi and hot meals. The food is not traditional Japanese so might appeal to people looking for something a bit different.
Go for: A different fusion-Japanese food experience.
Iku Sushi
140 William Street
PERTH WA 6000
(08) 9322 6008
Trading Hours
Monday to Thursday - 7:30am to 7pm
Friday - 7:30am to 9pm
Saturday and Sunday - 11am to 5:30pm
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4 comments:
The ramen looks terrible! Especially for $10!
That chicken katsu sauce looks like goop, scary stuff. Think I'll stick to (albeit more expensive) Satsuki's deep fried tuna roll. Thanks for the informative review. ;)
From the looks of it, I'd probably for the sushi. It looks yummy.
Thanks for sharing!
Mei: Thanks! I've had better curry sauce with katsu but at least they used a Japanese curry. I'm going to have to get down to Satsuki some time. Been meaning to for ages.
Jayson: Thanks Jayson. The sushi was the better tasting of the three dishes we tried and they do say it's their specialty. I guess with really good sushi places around (my favourite in Perth is still Ayami for the freshness, variety of fish and expertise) it's difficult to sometimes differentiate yourself in a good way.
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