Kitcho Izakaya is a Japanese Izakaya style restaurant, apparently run by Chinese people, located in Richmond. I call their style of food as the kitchen sink approach to luxury. This is not traditional Japanese food. They incorporate almost every luxury ingredient you can think of, from foie gras to blue fin tuna, combine it in some form, and serve it. Its not cheap, but it works well for the most part, if you want to feel like a glutton after.
We started with the short rib skewers. They were delicious. With every bite, you get good amounts of a nice grilled taste, sweetness, umami, and fat. The beef was tender. We ordered seconds of this.
Next was blue fin tuna nigiri topped with uni and Ikura. The rice could be improved but the sheer luxuriousness of the bite more than made up for it.
Next, foie gras toast. This was good and was topped with just enough acidity in the sauce to cut the fat.
Crab (lobster?) broth and foie gras. The broth was flavorful and well developed. The foie gras went nicely with it.
Next were two different bowls that you mix and scoop into seaweed. The first was uni, crab and ikura and the second was uni, ikura and blue fin.
I think you get the idea by now of why I call this the luxury kitchen sink approach. Following these was something interesting I had never seen before. Uni tempura! Basically its uni wrapped in shiso leaf and then deep fried. The uni flavor gets lost in the shiso and deep fry, but its a very interesting way to serve uni.
The madness continues with more blue fin and ikura.
Then crab motoyaki. The presentation was fantastic. The crab meat was complimented by mushrooms.
After that, as a symbolism of the excess of this place, unagi nigiri, but they basically serve you the entire eel in one piece of nigiri!
Also served was a flounder nigiri, served aburi style. The flounder was like butter and just melted in my mouth.
We proceeded to order a second round of food including blue fin tuna nigiri. By this point, I was almost blue finned out which I never thought would be possible. Note that the blue fin was decent, but not the best.
The last 3 items were beef tongue skewers (good), tontoro (also good), and complimentary kawahagi (good but second to Zakkushi on Denman.
Overall service was pretty good though a bit slow to seat us even though we had reservations. As mentioned above, the bill was not cheap which was expected considering the ingredients involved. This is the kind of place you go to if you just want to indulge in a large amount of luxurious ingredients. I would probably go back at some point in the future.