Monthly Archives: April 2009

It’s Sunday, and I’m still full from Friday’s night out at Hapa Izakaya, a Japanese tapas restaurant on Robson Street that is my favorite place to take new visitors to Vancouver.

The slick, black-walled restaurant was started in 2003 by hapa Justin Ault — hapa is a Hawaiian word that describes a person of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander heritage. It received immediate awards for its contemporary Japanese cooking and was at the forefront of the wave of small plate Japanese fusion cuisine that has spread around Vancouver.

And it continues to spread — Hapa recently took over the lease to the carpet store that moved out next door, and Justin has plans to put in a sushi bar and additional drink bar in the reconfigured restaurant. Construction will hopefully be finished before summer’s over.

Hapa currently has two locations. The downtown hipster spot, which is the larger of the two with a more diverse menu, doesn’t take reservations between 6 and 8 — you reserve for 5:30 after work, or you drop in and take your chances. The Kitsilano location offers reservations all night, and is a little calmer.

But you don’t go for calm; you go for the food, and what Hapa has to offer is spectacular. About half the menu is permanent, and half are rotating specials that vary with the season and the creativity of the kitchen. On this visit, they were experimenting with some new deliciousness including squid with curry salt, tortilla wraps and pork ribs.

The squid is the most boring looking food I’ve seen in ages, but it was the most tasty zing of flavour I’ve tried this year. Unbelievable. The pork rib was delicious, but was hard to share (you can’t share a bone) and the amount of cabbage it was served with was — unnecessary. Skip the tortilla wraps; I don’t know what I was thinking when I ordered them.

As for my usual go-to foods: the favorite hands down, among me and my guests is the kakuni, a simmered pork belly with onions and hot mustard that you wrap in a steamed bun. Yes, it’s 80% fat. It’s also 800% good.

The most popular dish, ebi mayo, is tempura’d shrimp with a delicious mayo sauce which balances sweet and spicy without going overboard in either direction, though they also seem a little ordinary and insufficient. Different delicious mayo sauces accompany many of the dishes. For instance, I love me the chicken karaage, which at other Japanese restaurants is often deep fried chicken wings, but at Hapa rises to a transcendent plain of delicate hot chicken balled up and battered in crispy yum, with an especially creamy mayo that makes the good, great.

Hapa seems to have a gift for doing “ordinary” pub food, better. I’m always surprised at the salmon sashimi — again, you can order this many places and be unimpressed with it, but at Hapa, it’s more powerfully flavorful than anywhere else I could think of offhand.

There are very few things on the menu to avoid (the kim chi isn’t worth much) but there are also some items you might overlook that you shouldn’t: Renkon gyoza are an odd but delicious frankenstein of lotus root, pork filling and tempura-style batter (5 per plate). Saba is a pickled mackerel that is not only quite tasty but also gets seared with a blow torch at your table which always impresses.

The hot stone rice bowls are excellent value, but they are mostly filler, and I’d prefer to order another kakuni.

Drinkwise, they have a large selection of frou frou cocktail drinks, but many people order the sake. The basic takezake is house sake served in a chilled bamboo jug that definitely makes the sake taste crisper and also keeps you guessing how much you have left; pouring from a bamboo cylinder is best left to the most sober of the patrons at your table.

Prices aren’t bad. I end up always thinking I ought to have paid more for the amount of food and drink I consumed. Expect to pay between $25-$40 per person. And expect to see me there next time you dine there.

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Hapa Izakaya
1479 Robson Street, Vancouver