Eko Sushi

If you’re like me and I bet you are, you love fresh sushi. Eko’s sushi is the freshest and there’s so much of it! Not a week goes by without me stopping in and being treated to a hot tea by the owner Duke while the family prepares a fresh meal to go. A real perl for this area!

I really like this place! I only eat the vegetarian options, so I can’t comment on most of the menu, but what I have tried has always been fresh, delicious and CHEAP. I’ve had the large vegetarian roll ($ 5), and the smaller avocado, sweet potato and tofu tempura (between $ 2 & $ 2.50 each). The place is tiny but the staff are very friendly, and if you eat there they provide complimentary tea. When I took some leftovers home they packed it up for me and also included a fresh container of soy sauce, extra wasabi and ginger. So nice!
Note for vegans: If you order the vegetarian roll, ask for it without mayo.

Eko Sushi, situé au 3502 Notre-​Dame Ouest, n’est pas mon premier choix de sushis.
Ce n’est pas que c’est pas bon. C’est plus que ce n’était pas très frais. Il faut dire que j’y suis été un soir de semaine 1h avant la fermeture. Pour moi, tous les sushis goûtent pareil. Par contre, on peut remarquer quand celui-​ci n’est pas frais, surtout quand c’est une petite crevette sur le morceau de riz.
La soupe venait avec un morceau d’huître au complet avec la coquille, ce qui nous né a pas laissé en confiance.
Je le nomme donc dernier recours de sushis dans le sud-​ouest.

What a hard place to rate. Normally you can finish a meal with a pretty good idea of what direction your subsequent review is going to take… but this one was difficult for me. No doubt, this is a no-​frills little restaurant that isn’t going to see a lot of date night action due to its unattractive fluorescent lighting and complete lack of any aesthetic beauty whatsoever, reminiscent of the office environment at the opening of Joe Vs. the Volcano. I can’t ding it for that though — I’ve been to countless restaurants that would convince you that a sense of style and culinary talent are mutually exclusive traits, restaurants on both ends of that spectrum as a matter of fact. As far as I’m concerned, if you walk away from a restaurant because of its décor, you might just be missing some of the best food out there!
So what of this microscopic little 8-​seater closet on rue Notre Dame? Clad in sickly lime green walls and red floors and random crap everywhere, it’s not going to be winning any design awards. There also appears to be no English menu (a bit of a struggle for tourists or temporary transplants such as myself, although it doesn’t require Holmesian powers of deduction to ascertain the meaning of ‘avocat’ or ‘saumon’) and the proprietors aren’t much help in that regard. I asked what something on the menu meant and ended up inadvertently ordering it, oh well.
I ordered the Rainbow Roll and a Dynamite Tuna roll. Two rolls for a grand total of $ 16.10 — that’s a full $ 7 cheaper than the last sushi I had in Montréal for the same number of pieces! And the Eko sushi literally dwarfed those other rolls in size. HUGE rolls, nearly to the point of being uncomfortable to eat; certainly uncomfortable to eat in front of other people. Take a look:
Two rolls of five pieces each were seriously filling.
It’s not the best sushi I’ve ever had, although it’s solidly in the middle of the pack. The fish is fresh, but the execution is just a little on the uninteresting side — I’d love to see a little more creativity. At one point I wondered if they had forgotten to put the «Dynamite» in the Dynamite Tuna. The rice was also a little too sticky; it should hold the roll together nicely, but it shouldn’t stick to the plate that much. I took my rolls to go because even as the only customer in the shop at the time, I still felt a bit crowded. As they began to prepare my order the first thing I heard was the microwave door, and that had me a bit concerned. What are you microwaving?! I still don’t know.
The sushi was prepared on the same 2-​meter counter top that the cash register occupies, but obviously space is at a premium here, so what are you going to do. It’s the final result that matters, and the final result was good. I struggled for a long time between 3 and 4 stars for this little shop because the value is there, but in the end I think it was just a little shy of that fourth star. I feel that way mainly because while the rolls were good, they tasted sort of like carbon copies of each other. Nothing really stood out to differentiate one roll from the other.