Kasa Moto is two floors of Yorkvillian luxe in the former Remys; should you wish to drop $200 on a Japanese dinner for two with a lot of pretty people, Kasa Moto is your spot. It’s owned by the Chase Hospitality Group, of The Chase, The Chase Fish and Oyster and the Thompson Hotel’s Colette. Fancy Shmancy.
So I had high hopes.
Oh well.
First off, the dining room is weird, chopped up into unattractive small bites with blah grey tub chairs and few grace notes. If this is minimalism, give me tchotchkes.
Then there’s the service. Pretty much everything came at once, with no explanation offered about what was what. A little pacing might have been nice, especially at these prices. And how about bringing the soup with everything else? I asked the waiter why the soup didn’t come first, and he said that’s cause they serve it last.
But it came all jumbled up with everything else. In my world, if you’re charging $13 for a bowl of soup and calling it lobster miso, you better 1) serve it at the right time and 2) gimme lobster. Not so much. As a long-term fan of miso soup, having eaten it in Japan and here, I found this rendition shockingly flavour-free. The lobster was eentsy bits of overcooked lobster, flavour also MIA.
Which I can’t figure out. The chefs are Daisuke Izutsu, who’s cooked at the superlative Kaiseki-Sakura, Michael Parubocki from the estimable Momofuku Noodle Bar and Frank’s Kitchen, and Tsuyoshi Yoshinaga (ex Yasu, Kingyo and Kaji). These guys have pedigrees. Have they dumbed it down for Yorkville? One could hardly blame them for not doing their best at Toronto’s epicentre of all that is skin-deep glamour and glitz.
It’s all pretty good. But pretty good for that money? Hamachi ponzu is nice fresh yellowtail with a pool of properly puckery ponzu and some shiso oil, topped with a significant pile of what they call “crispy carrot.” It’s carrot shreds that have, presumably, been deep-fried. Should be ultra crisp and sweet. Who knows how long they sat before being delivered. Let’s just say there’s many a slip ‘twixt the deep fryer and my lip, ’cause these crispy carrots aren’t.
Tuna tataki is similarly pleasant but also not special — good tuna, each slice nicely draped over a curl of daikon, some ponzu and aïoli but none of it notable. Same deal for ceviche salad, small chunks of raw salmon, tuna, yellowtail and root veg with citrus dressing. If you ate that at my house you’d be impressed. At a Japanese restaurant for $16, not so much.
They make much of their robata bar. Hope springs eternal. We ordered robata gulf shrimps, imagining flame-kissed, soft-in-the-middle sweet shrimps. With garlic chips (yum!) and soy butter. There was no evidence of soy butter, whatever that is, and no garlic chips. They woulda helped the blah slightly dry shrimps.
More shrimp disappointment came in the form of rock shrimp tempura. Why would anybody in their right mind bathe tempura anything in aïoli? To make it mushy after doing their best to make it crispy in the deep fryer? If that was their goal, they succeeded admirably.
All in all, it’s the kind of disappointment that we’ve long learned to expect when dining in Yorkville — a haven for unsuspecting tourists and those who prize form above function.
Kasa Moto, 115 Yorkville Ave., $150 Dinner for two
Joanne Kates trained at the Ecole Cordon Bleu de Cuisine in Paris. She has written articles for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Maclean’s and Chatelaine.