TOMO Restaurant

At TOMO, a table can eat two different ways on the same evening. The à la carte menu runs a premium raw bar — crudo, nigiri, sashimi, and rolls built on Japanese A5 Wagyu, seared foie gras, and truffle — while a separate counter, HIKARU by TOMO, runs a sixteen-course omakase for diners who want the kitchen to set the pace from first bite to last. Both share an address on Clarence Street, in the thick of Ottawa's ByWard Market, and both are built for the planned dinner rather than the casual drop-in.

The raw side is where the kitchen shows its hand. Crudos arrive dressed with restraint and precision — scallops with yuzu ponzu and truffle salsa, sliced ocean trout as Masu Tataki with truffle ponzu and apple chili crunch, hamachi cut through with jalapeño and yuzu. Sashimi and a chirashizushi bowl of fish over seasoned rice round out the cold offering, and the nigiri can be taken as a Chef's Choice of six pieces, the cleanest way to read the seafood without committing to the full tasting. Even the rolls aim higher than convention: the Ginza 6ix stacks Black Tiger tempura, A5 Wagyu, seared foie gras, truffle salsa, and gold flakes into a single, deliberately excessive bite meant to be shared.

The starters keep that ambition without losing the comfort that anchors a sushi meal. Hamachi and spicy tuna come layered over crispy golden rice; Wagyu beef gyoza arrive with a black-vinegar sauce; karaage chicken is fried extra crisp and cut with yuzu ranch; panko-breaded Black Tiger prawns land in a creamy mango sauce. Even the miso soup is built up rather than poured out, its hon-dashi broth enriched with fish-of-the-day bone stock and chrysanthemum tofu. The menu rewards a table that orders in stages — a few crudo and crispy-rice bites to open, a Chef's Choice nigiri run to gauge how far into the sushi bar the night should go, then a richer plate to land on.

Those richer plates are where TOMO commits to occasion over habit. Black cod is marinated forty-eight hours in den miso and finished with seasonal pickles; A5 Wagyu is served over lychee-balsamic short-grain rice or grilled as a striploin with yakiniku sauce; crisp-skinned ocean trout comes with uni-miso parmesan cream and ikura; a prime ribeye is finished with miso butter and Maldon salt. The luxury ingredients are not garnish here — they are the premise, and the pricing follows. This is a kitchen that assumes a diner who has chosen the evening in advance, which is also why it keeps late hours, open until two in the morning on Fridays and Saturdays while the Market fills up around it.

The current à la carte menu is the work of Executive Chef Daniel Ken Miyamoto, while the HIKARU omakase runs on its own counter under Chef Hikaru Yokoyama — sashimi, premium nigiri, a hand roll, Wagyu, soup, tamago, and dessert moving across sixteen courses. The restaurant is owned by Ann Lee and Ken Lee. TOMO opened in 2017, and by recent local accounts it has spent the years since sharpening its Japanese dining room and leaning harder into the omakase format rather than coasting on a ByWard Market address.

That leaves TOMO less a single sushi destination than a two-track restaurant: the à la carte menu for a table that wants to build its own night across crudo, rolls, and Wagyu, and the HIKARU counter for one that would rather hand the evening over. A clean finish is built in either way — Matcha Tiramisu, its mascarpone and ladyfingers cut with Vietnamese coffee and Grand Marnier, made to close a rich meal without flattening it. Both paths end a few steps off the Market's busiest corners, at the kind of dinner people make a reservation to have.