Shook things up a little and went for Japanese Tapas at Hapa Izakaya on Robson. On the outside, it’s a foreboding looking place with the windows shaded black and no view into the interior. Inside, it’s warm and the dark interior and furnishings are lit up by rice paper-shaded lamps. A lot of the seating style is tatami-style (where you remove your shoes), some regular tables, and a long, lit sushi bar contributing to light and at which you can have your meal and chat with a chef while he’s in action.

The maitre d’ greets us loudly in Japanese and I know not how to reproduce but presumably it means “Welcome!!” Throughout the meal, we would hear a lot of Japanese being exchanged between servers and chefs - a lot in volume but probably not in content - a lot of “Thank you and goodbye!” and simple requests to the chefs but in a language you can lilt so much, even yelling over the patrons’ heads is a little endearing and injects some more culture into the atmosphere.

We selected to share bacon enoki maki, kakuni, chicken karaage, yaki udon, marinated beef short ribs, and om-rice.

You see in the image only chicken karaage (foreground), yaki udon (background right), and beef short ribs (background left) because the bacon-enoki maki - dainty little bites (4 pcs.) of a bundle of enoki (mushroom) wrapped twice around by a strip of bacon - disappeared quickly and we only added the om-rice later. The chicken was fantastic, coated in a batter still a little crunchy despite the seasoning with a tart sauce. It came with a dish of what I describe as tatziki, a cool complement to the morsels of fried chicken. The udon and ribs were pretty standard fair but solidly good. Kakuni arrived later because it was “slow-simmer Chinese pork” soaked in it’s braising sauce. I think some people wouldn’t like the cut of the pork as it was replete with layers of fat. It was served with white steamed Chinese “bread” that the pork opened out to easily lay upon, and some brown wasabi.

We added an om-rice that was chicken, onion, and egg sauteed in plenty of mildly spicy tomato sauce and then stirred into rice and cooked in a heavy stone bowl resembling a mortar. The bowl arrived at our table crackling hot and despite being at the near-full stage, it went down easily as it’s a truly comfort-food dish.

The only other thing (to be complete) we ordered was a tea and our total (for four people) came to $47-something, to which I commented, “Ambience, good service, cool and good food, trendy fare, downtown, 47 is really good!” Because you know when you’re downtown you’re paying for the ambience and trend-factor.

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Hapa Izakaya
1479 Robson Street (@ Nicola), Vancouver, B.C.
Web address : http://www.hapaizakaya.com