Japadog (Robson)

Japadog (Robson)
530 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC

Unless you have been living under a rock, the most popular “restaurant” in Vancouver is Japadog, which isn’t a sit-down restaurant at all but a hot dog cart. Giving some twist in the form of Japanese toppings to the regular hot dog, it has appeared in TV shows like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, which have propelled it to the world. Given its popularity, it was only a matter of time it would open a proper sit down restaurant/front store. After months in the making, Japadog, the store, finally opened…

Japadog “restaurant” located in the 500 block of Robson Street, sharing the same general area as Gyuu Don Ya, Falafel Maison, Kushi Box, Viet Sub and Beard Papa’s. Good eats galore???

It is needless to say there are some high expectations; after all, pretty much every food blogger have liked Japadog hot dogs. In my case, that was true when I visited originally; however… When it something becomes to commonplace, it also turns lackluster. I mean, there was the novelty originally but, after all this time, that started to wore off. After all, since almost all ingredients are at arms reach, you can even make it yourself at home, like JS of [eatingclub]Vancouver did in this post. So, given that now there was that infrastructure, the question was what they will be able to bring out… For that purpose, I chose to go this last Sunday at noon sharp. After queueing up…

The store menu (as of May 31st, 2010.

The grill where the sausages/wurst are “grilled”.

Condiments anybody?

Here is one pet peeve: it took ~30 minutes from queueing up to getting my order. I thought that was a bit ridiculous considering that most of the food can be halfway prepared in advance. Of course, it does not help much that the people in the queue couldn’t decide what to order… But, having said that, here is what I ordered, starting with…

Yakiniku Rice which novelty lies in its bun or, rather, instead of a hot dog bun it is made of rice and then topped with some beef. The rice as a bun was somewhat of a fail. It was good in the sense it did soak some of the sauce/juice from the steak but, at the same time, it was a fail because it was problematic to eat (it kept falling off). The problem with this hot dog is that it is mostly sweet due to the teriyaki-like sauce in the beef. That would work for most people; however, if I had to compare a really similar dog, it would be mostly OK. Which similar dog? That would be DougieDog’s Seoul dog, which I tried in my visit. In that case, in addition to the beef, there was also that crunchiness and somewhat contrasting of the pickle.

In addition to the Yakiniku Rice, I also had the Love Meat, which has meat sauce and cheese. While I haven’t tried it in long time, I couldn’t help draw comparisons with Dairy Queen’s chilli dog. In the case of Japadog’s, I thought it had some sweet overtones in the meat sauce. It was OK but not something that would excite me much.

I ordered the hot dogs above in a combo which includes shaken fries, i.e., fries with some “interesting” toppings. Here, aonori, or some green seaweed. I think the best way to compare it would be fries with some dill in it. OK, not necessarily with that unique dill taste but it had a lot of savoury overtones. But, alas, the fries were a fail: neither crispy nor fluffy. In fact, it felt like old fries. Not good, in my opinion.

At that point, under normal conditions, I would have written my post based on the two dogs I had. But, I am sure that a lot of people would call shenanigans. So, I decided to visit Japadog again, this time bringing work colleague PO with me. In this case, he ordered the tonkatsu “hot dog”. Technically, it is not a hot dog, as in the middle is not a sausage or a wurst but a pork cutlet. I forgot completely to *ahem*question*ahem* check with him about it but suffice to say he found it average, though made notes the pork was tender and well fried…

As for myself, I decided to check how the store manage to prepare the well known ones. In this case, to the left, terimayo, while, to the right, there is the okonomi. However, there was something really strange: where is the bonito flakes? I asked the staff if that was the okonomi and they repeated, yup, that was it. In that case, I thought they weren’t that different from each other so the lack of that critical component made that a complete fail. As for the terimayo, if you have had it before then you know what you should expect: some sweet sauce and some savoury tones. So, in a way, if you had it before, expect more of the same.

Both of us ordered our dogs in a combo; in PO’s case, he chose japa shio while I went for the butter and shoyu. In the picture above, the japa shio, which is basically Japanese sea salt. The truth is that it didn’t taste that much different from any seasoned fries you could get from a chain restaurant, hell, maybe even McCain’s fries! But, PO joked it contains “pure crack” added to get customers coming back for more! As for me, the butter and shoyu (not picture; it looked the same as the fries above but without any seasoning). I will summarize this version as the fries version of pop corn. It had *that* taste…

Overall, I had some mixed feelings but, for the most part, it falls into these not-like it category. The good includes the fact there are new options. The bad… Well, that’s a long one, among them how slow the food was prepared and the somewhat cramped place (had they made it into something similar to Dogfather, I won’t have said anything). That aside one of the biggest issues for me (and I could partially blame my imagination here) is related to the size of the offerings – for some odd reason, I thought the Love Meat and the terimayo were smaller. Could it be they were using regular sausages instead of wursts? The other issue is that the new location is nothing new (i.e., something other than hot dogs) but just a continuation what has worked for them. While that is all good, given their narrow menu, I thought that gave them a chance to reinvent themselves – to stretch further. Alas, it ended up being a case of “been there, done that”… But, hey, if you like Japadog for what it is, then you will like it.

Tagged under: Hot Dog • Japanese • Vancouver