(Image: Svadilfari)
When Ken Valvur first tried fresh, unpasteurized Japanese sake, it changed his life. “That’s how I fell in love with it,” he recalls. “When I tasted just-pressed sake, it was an amazing moment for me.” There are few sake breweries in North America (Canada has two on the west coast), so the alcoholic rice beverage is usually pasteurized for its transport over vast distances. Most Torontonians never get to enjoy sake the way it was meant to be. Valvur intends to change all that when he opens the Ontario Spring Water Sake Company, the first sake brewery in eastern North America. The doors are scheduled to open this spring in the Distillery District.
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Ken Zhang has been a sushi star going on a decade now, thanks to his time at Japango across from city hall, where he served some of the hardest-to-find fish in town. Now on his own, his cut fish and rolls at Couture are still excellent. His couture roll—rice and avocado wrapped in nori, topped with salmon and a scallop slice and flash-toasted with a blowtorch—is given a boost with scallion and roe. (But don’t order the o‑toro, a.k.a. bluefin tuna—it’s severely threatened, the marine equivalent of eating baby panda.) Zhang’s hot dishes, however, sometimes miss the mark. The $70 omakase option here is just $10 less than Sushi Kaji’s basic omakase and doesn’t begin to approach the master’s orbit. A soup of buttery shell clams, for instance, should be beautiful given its ingredients of sake, butter, yuzu zest and soy, but there’s far too much soy, so it’s too salty for more than a few sips. Roast duck salad brings cold, chewy slices as pallid as Lloyd Robertson’s wattle over mesclun mix that has started to brown. The tempura aji is exceptional, chopped and mixed with scallions, folded into a shiso leaf and quickly fried: the taste is creamy and full, balanced out with the sharp onions, the soapy leaf and crunchy shell. Unlicensed. Mains $19–$26.
Minsoo Kim proudly sets one of his sushi creations, the South Beach roll, on the table. Nestled next to a set of rice-free rolls wrapped in cucumber are two slices of bluefin tuna, the sashimi mother lode, marbled with fat like a steak. “That is the best tuna in the entire world,” Kim says of the rare, 
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