Kou Sushi (Rivervale)

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Before reading ❗️

The details 📝

Our favourite cuisine, hands down, is Japanese food. It shouldn't come as any surprise as our name "pekopeko" is named after Japanese onomatopoeia and we grew up in the 2000s with lots of exposure to Japanese culture. Having said that, we're always on the hunt for new Japanese restaurants.

Kou Sushi is a relatively new Japanese restaurant in Rivervale which opened mid 2021. The interior features calming green and earth tones.

We started with the beef tataki which was generous serve. It was shared between the two of us, but could easily be shared between 3 or 4 people.

Around a dozen sushi rolls are available on the menu. Our pick was the grilled wagyu roll which was beautifully garnished and executed. There was probably at least 8 - 10 pieces.

For "mains", Paige's pick was the aburi don. Sashimi was fresh. This aburi bowl comes uniquely with a generous helping of seaweed, which lets you enjoy the sashimi temaki style (hand roll). Scoop the rice and sashimi into the seaweed to enjoy. They had run out of amaebi (sweet prawn) for the night so she got extra salmon to substitute it.

Something else we wanted to point out is the tableware used. Both Paige and I are suckers for beautiful tableware and we always enjoy discovering where restaurants source their dinnerware.

My pick for mains was their prawn cream curry don. Non-seafood and vegetarian curry options are also available.

One of the things that drew me to Kou Sushi is their homemade curry - something that only a small handful of Japanese restaurants do. On the topic of homemade - Kou Sushi make their sauces, curry, udon soup and miso soup in house.

Kou Sushi slowly simmers their curry for 5 - 6 hours. The result is a delicious curry with beautifully caramelised, almost dark chocolatey flavours and for sure, one of my favourite bowls of Japanese curry I've had in Perth. Note, the consistency of the sauce itself is a little on the thinner side, but was beautifully soaked up by the starchy rice.

Back to the appreciation of Kou Sushi's tableware - the bowl used for the curry reminded of curry I enjoyed years ago at Osanbashi Pier in Yokohama. Maybe it was the chequered blue that evoked the nostalgia.

On a subsequent visit, we tried a number of their starters, nigiri and sushi rolls.

The tempura prawns were of a generous size and fluffy. The batter was a little thicker than what we normally prefer. To make it easier to dip, we would've preferred a slightly deeper bowl for the tempura sauce.

We're not usually fans of eggplant, but ever since discovering miso eggplant (nasu dengaku) years ago, we've been hooked. Eggplant pieces were large.

The karaage had a hint of sweetness from the teriyaki sauce. It paired beautifully with the kewpie mayo.

We ordered their aburi combo (salmon nigiri) and aburi mix (salmon, prawn and scallop) between four people. Each had a decent about of sashimi and was well garnish. Our favourite of the two would be the aburi mix because of the different varieties of seafood.

On our third visit, we ordered their assorted sashimi and toro nigiri. All the fish was superbly fresh.

Line-up of fresh sashimi:

Pink snapper
Tasmanian salmon
Fremantle cooked octopus
Raw tuna
Amaebi prawn
Scallop

We appreciated the amaebi prawn (sweet prawn), something you don't see as often at smaller Japanese restaurants.

The toro (tuna belly) nigiri, as expected was rich and fatty. For the price of around $5 a slice, we can't complain.

Without doubt, Kou Sushi has become one of our favourite discoveries in 2022 and has earned a place on rotation for Japanese restaurants. Service was friendly, food was excellent and serving sizes were generous. We'll be back for more!

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