CLOSED - Wild Ginger Asian Fusion (Japanese)

(UPDATE 2014 Nov. 21) Very unfortunately, Wild Ginger seems to have disappeared. After a two week closure another sushi restaurant opened in its place called 99 Cent Sushi. I incorrectly indicated at first that it wasn't AYCE (perhaps it wasn't at the beginning) but it is, so I hope to have a review up soon for it!


Wild Ginger Asian Fusion can be found at 389 Church Street, at Wellesley, in Toronto, It's just east of the Wellesley subway station on the Yonge line if you are coming by transit (which I recommend for downtown TO).

We found it accidentally when we were traveling to another AYCE, and made it a point to return. A couple of weeks later we did, and were happy to have done so! We ended coming back again less than a week later too.

It's a cozy environment with lots of available booths.  Both times we went for dinner and there weren't many patrons, so I inquired whether it ever got busy (as it certainly deserves to.) It does get busy at lunchtime, probably on business days being in the core. Aside from the (quiet) music, I can't think of anything else at Wild Ginger Asian Fusion that wasn't superlative. For starters, all the soy sauce is low-sodium, and it really is, as other places' "low-sodium" still ends up tasting salty, but not here. The miso soup was ravishingly good, perfectly savoury with a smoky hint that I loved. Salad was fresh and crisp with an earthy, robust dressing that seemed to be based on peanut oil.

Cheese wontons were excellent and sauce was tasty; I'm usually not into sweet but the sauce complemented it perfectly. We'd never tried it before, so we tried pumpkin tempura, and to our surprise it was even tastier than the yam variety; (Mishy ended up having several more portions of it). The Chicken Teriyaki was also excellent, flavourful and "not rubbery" as Mishy likes to describe it. Popcorn chicken was also good and tasty; a bit dry but wouldn't be popcorn otherwise! Bacon asparagus had cheese on it too... nice touch to an already savoury dish.

Unlike some other ACYE's, the sushi pizza is small, a large bite-size, rather than being "slices" of minced sashimi on rice. The sauce was excellent and set off the salmon well. Although the sauce was a bit sweet, beef teriyaki was good. Beef skewers were also very good. And of course, the sushi and sashimi were perfectly fresh and flavorful and prepared well.

The base cost for dinner is $21.99, but there's a very generous 15% discount for paying cash, which results in $18.69. This is an excellent deal. The service was fast and friendly as well. I may be easy to impress as I seem to be handing out too many 10's these days, but its possibly due to the quality overall everywhere going up. The bad AYCEs are going bankrupt. I can't fault anything I found at Wild Ginger, so I'm left with no choice.

Rating: 10/10