Niseko Trip Report - Ezo Seafoods

Ezo Seafoods at Niseko deserves its own trip report.  We ate here on Thursday night and it really set the bar.  It was a bit hard to find though - it's buried behind a mound of snow!

What a fabulous place!  If you come to Niseko this is a must.  We went all out and told Jamie, the restaurant proprietor, to please go ahead and give us everything good.

I was a little nervous at our carte blanche request, basically not restricting the restaurant except to emphasize that we wanted king crab, and oyster, and blue fin tuna, and oh yeah, scallops, and sea urchin too...

You know what?  It was so worth it.  In the order of appearance at the table:

Wow, just wow.  These king crab legs were so amazing.  Probably my favorite.

The sea urchin was so tender.  The bluefin tuna was amazing, so tender and sweet.

 This platter of oysters needs no further explanation.

This was a huge scallop lightly seared sitting atop a bed of cabbage.

Grilled squid with a wasabi mayonnaise sauce.

The crab was so good we got seconds.

The uni was so good we got seconds.  And we also got some scallop sashimi.  I loved both of these items - so tender and lightly sweet.

Funny story about this next one - the waitress plopped it down declaring "Breast cheek".  And we all looked at each other and thought, what the heck are we eating?  Not particularly timid about food, we all dove in, thinking the dish was ribs (which seemed a bit incongruous).   What does that look like to you?

Turns out?  The woman meant "braised" and "cheek" didn't refer to beef or pork but rather fish!  It was braised fish cheek!  Just think about the size of the fish to have this be its cheek.  This dish was really good - incredible flavor and fall-off-the-bone melt-in-your mouth fish.  

This was a platter of cabbage.  Just because.  Vegetables are good for you.

This was a seafood medley (fish and clams) cooked in a tomato and lemon sauce.  The lemons had been cooked for so long that they were full of melt-in-your-mouth concentrated tart flavor -- I ate them!

 The last dish to finish off the night - a fragrant clam soup.  My only issue with this one was that there were too many spring onions.  And I didn't think they should have sullied the broth with tomatoes.