My first office birthday celebration that I was lucky enough to be invited to.
Happy Birthday to our youngest member of the office, Oswald!
Our little boy have finally grown a year wiser .
Everyone from the creative team decided to go for a makan-makan celebration.
Who wouldn’t agree that good food is the best to bond us together.
We decided on Umai-ya Restaurant which happens to be very near to our office.
We totally love this place as it is a great Japanese restaurant near us that has nice ambience (although I find the chandelier odd in comparison to the rest of the deco).
Their menu looks good and make me determined to try ALL their dishes.
Yes, every single one of them!
And I guess by now I would have covered at least 30% of what they have.
The group totally love sashimi, a really simple dish that will shine so long it is served fresh.
But I also think wasabi will be the game changer in this territory.
We ordered this Sake and Hamachi Sashimi to start things up.
Totally thumbs up ! The fish slices are fresh and thickly sliced.
Not to mention the food presentation is pretty and appealing!
The first round of sashimi got us totally addicted and we want more! Yes, more, more and more.
This time around, it’s all about salmon since all of us love salmon!
We ordered more Sake Sashimi and Sake Maki to fulfil our salmon cravings.
And the feeling of the salmon melting in my mouth is just HEAVENLY!
We even had Deep Fried Soft Shell Crab and that is really a huge crab.
Deep fried till golden brown, soft on the inside and but crispy on the outside.
While it is good, my crabs cravings hasn’t been cured exactly tho.
I still needed the thick and bouncy crab meat feel .
We got some tempura to the mix. And I normally benchmark a Japanese Restaurant by their tempura dish.
While tempura may seems like an easy dish to prepare, somehow many shops failed to impress.
The golden ratio to make the batter is important to get the crunchy yet light feel.
And most importantly, it shouldn’t be oily.
I must say, their Ebi Tempura is quite good! It’s really crunchy and light, while maintaining the freshness and the juiciness of the prawn. I totally love this dish!
We also ordered Unagi Tamago for sharing.
For someone who loves Unagi, I somehow didn’t exactly enjoy this dish.
Since this is the first time we ordered this, my first tasting left me disappointed.
The grilled unagi which normally have a strong grilled taste and the sweet aroma from the sauce were drowned down.
I couldn’t taste the Unagi taste, while the egg taste didn’t shine as well.
I am not sure if this is how the dish should taste like as I have no prior benchmark. So maybe is just me who love strong taste food.
We additionally ordered the Teppan Seafood, whereby it consists prawns, salmon fish slices and octopus served on a sizzling hot plate.
The dish is topped with some thousand island like sauce mixed with some chili flake.
While the seafood is seared to perfection, fresh and juicy; I find the sauce a little too overpowering and stole the limelight from the natural seafood taste.
I really felt the sauce didn’t go well with the seafood but I somehow can’t tell why exactly.
When the waitress came in and took our order earlier, she also asked if we would like to try their chef’s new creation sushi in which we said yes without any hesitation. Hence, the unnamed dish.
She was describing the dish and listed out a few ingredients and she got me at mango.
Fruits and sushi ? Sounds like a refreshing combination.
The presentation of the food is really beautiful and colourful.
They actually use thinly sliced mango to wrap the sushi, and topped with some kind of anchovies.
In the middle of the sushi, there were a generous amount of wasabi flavoured ebiko (shrimp roe) and some soft shell crab.
While I don’t normally like sweet and savoury food mixed together on a main dish, I gave an exception for this dish and find that the taste blends so well together and it tasted so good.
This dish is so rich in layers of textures, from the crunch from the ebiko to crispiness from the fried soft shell crab, wrapped in the soft and sweet mango. Stunning yet taste-blowing dish.
We all end up with a happy tummy and are so glad we spent time celebrating Oswald’s birthday with good food and great company.
Umai-ya Japanese Restaurant
Address: G-3A, The Place, Jalan PJU 8/5D, Bandar Damansara Perdana, Petaling Jaya
Phone: +603-7729 0015
Website:http://www.umai-ya.com/