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Tenshi Sushi
Categories: Restaurants Japanese Restaurants Sushi Bars Japanese, Sushi Bars [Edit]
304 10 St NWCalgary, AB T2N 1V8
(403) 457-0370
- Price Range:
-
$$
- Accepts Credit Cards:
- Yes
- Parking:
- Street
- Attire:
- Casual
- Good for Groups:
- No
- Good for Kids:
- Yes
- Takes Reservations:
- Yes
- Delivery:
- No
- Take Away:
- Yes
- Waiter Service:
- Yes
- Outdoor Seating:
- No
- Good For:
- Dinner
- Alcohol:
- Beer & Wine Only
- Noise Level:
- Loud
- Wheelchair Accessible:
- Yes
13 reviews for Tenshi Sushi
13 reviews in English
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Review from Zigge M.
Calgary, AB
2/7/2012
A good friend told me about this place. I loved it. Food was incredibly fresh, excellent presentation and the prices are very good comparable to others in the city. I'd say this lands as my new fav sushi joint.
The only issue is how small it it...but maybe this is not an issue? I personally like a little more elbow room in restaurants. I saw lots of take out orders - next time I'm doing take out, they're definitely hearing from me! -
Review from Erin D.
9/6/2011 4 Check-ins Here
I like Tenshi sushi. It's not the best sushi in Calgary, but it's miles better than what is out there. It's also incredibly affordable and there are lots of interesting dishes outside of just sushi. I have never eaten at the restaurant as it's the size of a closet and I don't live that far away so I tend to just get take out and eat in the comfort of my little home. I generally stick with Combo #2 which gets me a lovely assortment of sushi, some miso soup and a nice, fresh salad.
The only thing I would warn fellow Yelpers about is to ALWAYS check your take out order before leaving the restaurant, out of my last 10 orders there at least 6 have had something missing from them. Other than that, I would recommend it if you want a sushi fix! -
Review from Ljubica T.
Calgary, AB
2/8/2011
I'm beginning to think that the smaller a restaurant is, the better quality food and service you will receive. Tenshi is a great example! As a side note, when my husband and I go for sushi, we eat the real stuff (not just California rolls and Avocado rolls), so please keep this in mind when reading my reviews.
- Reasonable prices
- Cozy atmosphere
- Quality fish
- Good service
In particular, I'd like to talk about Inari Nigiri or tofu cakes. I don't usually eat this, but Tenshi Sushi's version definitely made this particular dish one of my favourites! Tenshi's Inari was not overly sweet and contained sushi rice, black sesame seeds and fresh slivers of cucumber. Yum! It was quite a hefty and delectable dish compared to the Inari I ordered from Sushi Ichiban on McLeod trail... ack, too sugary with barely any rice inside.... and no sesame seeds or cucumber!
We also ordered Tuna & Salmon don and although the fish was fresh, the rice was a bit too dry for my liking. I won't knock off a star for this because their sushi pieces were just too good.
I was not a fan of the sketchy tenant-shared restroom which is located just behind the kitchen area in the unglamorous guts of the building. -
Review from Ana C.
Calgary, AB
6/20/2011
This is a really cozy place, conveniently located and service is great! Prices are very reasonable for really fresh fish and decent rolls. They have sushi and sashimi combos that come with soup and salad as a complete meal, a fairly large variety of rolls and some specials like my favourite, the Stampeder roll.
We discovered it on a Saturday afternoon when, after waiting for about 45 min at the Globefish we decided to look for another place and finally have that sushi dinner that we had been craving for days. All stressed out, we came into Tenshi Sushi and got a tiny table on the corner of the store; as soon as we sat down it was all peace and quiet! We ordered and were served within 15-20 minutes and ended up being a very good experience. We are regular customers ever since. -
Review from Wendy P.
12/29/2010 1 Check-in Here
If there were a word like quaint, but that incorporated good food and nice decor with being small rather than just being cute with being small, that would be the word to use for Tenshi.
I was here with a group of 5 and we took up half the restaurant... okay maybe a third. But seriously, it's small! Considering the size of the restaurant, the staff do an amazing job of keeping the noise level down! There's a big open window into the kitchen which could be troublesome, but it's not. I don't think the kitchen staff said a single word to each other the entire time we were there. Maybe they've got their own sign language? They didn't even have a radio playing. Colour me impressed! This contributed a great deal to keep a zen-ish atmosphere about the place.
Tenshi gets the title of 'The First Place I've Ever Tried Sake.' I have nothing else to compare it to, so can't say if it was good sake or not, but it tasted good to me. It was a warm, but not hot, and tasted slightly sweet.
The rolls we ordered were made fresh on the spot. My favourite one this time around I think was this yummy little roll with cream cheese, avocado and salmon (I think).
Only downside was after we ordered a second round of rolls. We only wanted 3 more, but they took awhile to make it out to us. It wasn't enough though to stop me from giving them four stars.
Tenshi Sushi... you make good sushi! -
Review from Cat S.
Calgary, AB
4/27/2011
This place is teeny tiny! Best to get there by 5pm when they open. We had a group of about 7 and dominated the place. Its a little hole in the wall type joint, nothing eye catching on the outside. The prices were decent and we ordered a large variety of rolls and appetizers. I really loved all the food. The sushi was fresh and the rolls were delicious! Not too much rice.
Honestly I really enjoyed my meal here. I really wanted to give a 4 star review. However, it was really crappy service. We got in sat down. No one came to greet us. One of the girls in our group got up to get us menus. Considering this is a tiny place, there is no excuse for the bad service. So, we had our menus. We flagged the waitress down for some tea, and the flagged her down to order. She never checked on us, refilled our water or tea. Really now! There were two girls working, but they seemed to just stand in the back and ignore the customers.
I would come back here since I loved the food. Maybe it was just an off day for service. -
Review from Jollean C.
Vancouver, BC
12/3/2009 5 photos
Consider me convinced!
I've been to Tenshi twice now and I realized upon my second visit that this is the perfect Japanese restaurant. What I like about it is that it's intimate, small, cozy, quiet, cheerful, colourful, woodsy and has nice details. I was really upset when the Take 10 Cafe disappeared and Tenshi moved in. I lament no longer. With only about 7 tables and two counter seats, it's small but filled with dark wood, bright paper lanterns, traditional noren (curtains) and having lived in Tokyo, I delight in their Japanese ceramic cups, teapots and plates.
We started with the agedashi tofu (sans bonito flakes) which needed a lil more sauce but is a nice quantity, nicely done and the most reasonable in Calgary at $3. We followed that with an adventurous Gyu Tataki, only slightly seared thin strips of beef served on pebbled ice with stringy onions and a dipping sauce. For a girl who eats her steak medium well, I actually enjoyed this as it was the meat equivalent of sushi. A must for meat lovers. The spicky sake (salmon) roll is an enigma to me with its chili which causes a wonderful spice I have not had before. The eel & avocado roll was yum and the mango tango roll (tempura shrimp, mango and avocado) is just sheer ambrosia and simply stunning to look at. I also did my usual piece of nigiri salmon and it was one of the best pieces I've had. Oishi desu! (delicious!)
TOTAL thumbs up on Tenshi. I feel really at home there and it's wonderfully priced...far below other fusion places. There's some interesting things on the menu too such as Sushi Pizza. A wonderful addition to Kensington! -
Review from Ryan M.
Calgary, AB
5/29/2011 1 Check-in Here
Great service and fresh Sushi.
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Review from vanessa t.
Calgary, AB
6/7/2009 3 photos
We ordered a Shark fin salad. This was disgusting! You can taste that it was "out of the package" jelly fish. Yuck! The jelly fish tastes like plastic and it was super crunchy. It was more spicy than expected, and there were too much sesame seeds in the salad.
The lemon didn't help the taste either, just a TINY bit of lemon managed to cover ALL the taste of the salad, I think it made the salad even worst! Maybe because it was "out of the package" jelly fish. This may be the WORST salad I have ever tasted! I will never order this at Tenshi Sushi again
Gyu Tataki
This was actually decent. However, in comparison to the other restaurants, Sukiyaki House has the best beef tataki. The sauce was rather salty though. Overall, I liked this dish.
We ordered a few sushi and a few rolls. The Unagi was rather rough, but it tastes pretty good. Daywit's unagi was burnt, but mine was ok. The toro was really fishy, I could barely finish it...the reason why I never liked tuna was because of this taste. But if the tuna were really fresh, they don't have that strong fishy taste to it. Sushi Club has amazing toro, it doesn't taste too fishy and it melts in your mouth. Literally. The special scallop was amazing though, it made me want to order more. That was the second best special scallop I've ever had. The best was from El's, it was big and tasty. For Tenshi's, the scallop was fresh, there's not too much mayo, the rice wasn't too much. For the shark fin sushi, it tasted exactly like the salad, yuck.
As for the rolls, the caterpillar looks like the El's one, but the flavour isn't enough. The flavour of the caterpillar roll was really bland, no flavour standing out. The other roll is the spicy tako roll. The Spicy-ness was super over powering. However, the tako was amazingly soft! You can bite right through it when you're eating the sushi.
This place was horrible! The service was bad, the sushi wasn't all that great either. How did I hear about this place? My friend told me that it was pretty good. That was a little while ago, maybe that's why...sighh
I'm glad Daywit and I didn't order our regular amount. The service was so bad! The restaurant is so small, there's only 5-6 tables, there were around 15 people in the restaurant. She BARELY filled our water, NEVER asked how everything was, and doesn't clean the tables UNTIL there's something for our table from the kitchen. There were a lot of time when she had nothing to do but she just stands at the till and stares into space. Not going to be going back to Tenshi Sushi. Sorry.
[June 01, 2009]
Food Wise [1-Horrible, 5-Amazing] - 2.5/5
Service Wise [1-Horrible, 5-Amazing] - 1/5
Price Wise [1-Not worth it at all, 5-Worth every penny] - 1/5
Overall - 2/5 -
Review from Queenie M.
Calgary, AB
9/4/2010 2 photos
Food: 2.5/5
Atmosphere: 4/5
Service: 4/5
Overall experience: 2.5/5
(1- Terrible; 3- decent; 5- Fantastic)
Decided to check this out for lunch after my bf discovered it while he was walking around in Kensington. Compared to other sushi places in Calgary, Tenshi is on the bottom of my list. We both got lunch specials which range from $10-$12; I got the sushi and sashimi lunch combo and he got the teriyaki beef or chicken/tempura/sashimi combo.
Like most Japanese places the lunch combo comes with miso soup and salad. The soup was alright, a tad bit salty but I liked it because it was full of tofu and seaweed which is what I like in my miso soup. The salad was horrible! Instead of greens, they give you vinegar soaked cellophane noodles with cucumbers on top which had a very 'off' taste. I decided to stop eating it in case I paid for it later with a trip to the toilet. When my sushi/sashimi came I was quite disappointed. It came with 5 pieces of sashimi: 2 tuna which wasn't fresh and tough to eat (ideally it should melt in your mouth), 2 salmon, and a scallop; and 4 other dinky pieces of nigiri-zushi: red snapper, shrimp, roe (fish eggs), and shiromi (white fish). The nigiri had so little rice, literally about the size of a loonie and tasted plain (it should have a sweet vinegar taste from the addition of sushi vinegar). Like some places I've been to, I thought I would be getting at least one california roll or cucumber roll. Totally not worth the ~$11.25!
My boyfriend's combo came in a bento box, and I've definitely had way better; I really enjoy the lunch bento boxes at Shibuya which costs just about the same at Tenshi but is of better quality. The teriyaki beef was way too salty, overcooked, and the meat was of poor quality (very chewy, rubbery, and chopped up into small pieces). The tempura was just OK as my bf puts it. The shrimp was over-battered, but I did like the yam tempura which was lightly battered, nice and crispy.
The service was quite good, our server came by to take our finished dishes away and refilled our glasses when it was running low. The restaurant itself is small with about 6-7 tables, hardwood floors, and cute lanterns above each table. The cost of the sushi here is the average price you find in Calgary, but the size and quality of it doesn't justify the price. Then again.. it is run by Chinese people and not Japanese.
Overall, I've had wayyyyyyyy better in Calgary and I definitely won't be coming back. I'm going to assume the assorted sushi you can pick from was of same low quality as the sushi I had for lunch, and I suggest you skip this place for someplace better. Now that i think of it, I feel kind of jipped and wish I had tried the other lovely cafes in Kensington. -
Review from Cornelius V.
Calgary, AB
11/12/2009 2 Check-ins Here
I hope everyone writes 1 star reviews on this place so that way Gilchrist won't discover it, write a 5* review on it, and sluts to k-town like me won't get jaded by the lineups out the doors that occur every f'n hour. Look at what Gilchrist (bless his well intentioned heart) did to Globefish!
I like Japanese cuisine but I really like raw fish on rice in a nice setting. This place delivers. The value is very good although I am on the fence whether the fish is fresh or farm raised. The rolls are not very inspired. Half of them try to be Japanese yet western, yet the other half cater to our (bland) sensibilities. Places like this need FOCUS, y'know, either all inspired by western ingredients (which pretty much rules fish all fish other than trout out) or going 100% hard core 'KONBANWA GOIZAMAS!' overzealous Japanese waitress girl who opens the menu for you style Japanese service and (therefore) food (which is like creating a business model that involves swallowing gasoline: a few freaks will show up to witness this disaster, but your top business will go to japanese village or some bull shit.) This place, considering how intimate it is, should focus on something instead of trying to cater to the usual canadian lowest common denominator. Yet again, it's easy to yell about this while having zero restaurant management experience. This being said, it's a good place to get good sushi.
There were 2 of us and we went for a sushi binge which involved 50 large pieces of sushi, 2 Asahis for $60 plus tip. I (6'5'', 210lbs) had to take 15 pieces home which made for a VERY delicious and filling lunch. Considering how everything in Calgary is a rip off, this is a very good value.
On my second visit during lunch, my friend and I went for a very generously portioned bento that was $11 each.
Each time, there was good service, and this remains my favorite sushi place in town, including Towa, because Towa is f'n expensive, as slightly superior it is.
I am by no means a huge Japanese food connoisseur. On Japanese sophistication, I am 2.5/5, the .5 because I actually like trying weird and new types of food (like cute lovable dolphin!). If you're hardcore about sushi, I'd go with Vanessa's review because I'm happy with mercury-poisoned salmon on minute-rice saturated with grainy wasabi. -
Review from Oks M.
6/6/2010 1 photo
No matter where I am, I'm always on a quest to find good sushi that rivals Vancouver's (since nowhere else I had better so far). Apparently, this little Tenshi Sushi can make Calgary proud: it's fantastic. Perrrrrfect rice and amazingly fresh chilled fish that just melts in your mouth. This place is definitely waaaay above all those sushi restaurants that hotel concierge would try to recommend you. Go to Kensington area and enjoy it. This restaurant is a tiny hidden gem... and not expensive AT ALL!
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Review from C I.
Calgary, AB
4/22/2010
The best sushi place in Calgary.
No other yam tempura rolls can compare.
