In June the windows on this Burrard Street unit said only “Flame, Grill & Broth” and asked Vancouver to guess the rest.
Here is the answer.
SUMU grand opened on August 8 at 888 Burrard Street, in the unit SalaThai held for 38 years before closing in April 2024.
The sign reads 夏木 SUMU, with “Tokyo Street Fusion” underneath, and the concept is doing three things at once rather than picking a lane.
The flame half is binchotan yakitori, grilled over imported Japanese white charcoal by a chef the restaurant says has 30 years behind the grill.
The broth half is nabe (hot pot) you build yourself like the usual maltang concepts.
You walk to a display fridge, take what you want, and pay $4.19 per 100 grams, then pick one of 10 broths to cook it in.
That list is not a token selection either.
It runs sukiyaki soy and mirin, lemongrass tom yum, spiced red curry, Kyoto silken soy milk, slow cooked tomato, pork bone paitan, wild mushroom dashi, and three separate Sichuan options in mala, mao cai, and a spicier mala.
The yakitori list is 26 items deep on its own.
The third leg is the small stuff, mini donburi bowls, temari sushi in three-piece sets, katsu, and izakaya plates, with a tasting set that puts every donburi variety on the table at once.
The through line the restaurant puts on its own site is “One Table. Different Cravings,” which is a tidy way of saying nobody at your table has to agree on dinner.
That is the yokocho idea, the Tokyo alley where you eat a skewer at one counter and a bowl at the next, folded into one 130-seat room.
The room is the other half of the pitch.
This is a considerably more expensive fit-out than the unit has seen before, built around a signature installation of sculptural glass flowers suspended from golden branches.
What makes this worth the trip is also the risk in it.
A restaurant doing yakitori, hot pot, donburi, sushi and bubble tea under one roof is either the most useful room downtown or spread too thin, and nobody can tell from the sidewalk.
The unit itself has something to prove too, having sat empty for over two years after a 38-year tenant.
SUMU joins a run of recently opened Vancouver spots like Meros Yogurt, Mello on Robson, and Chaiiwala Robson.
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Address: 888 Burrard Street, Vancouver, BC