I like fish. I am not building to a confession here. I eat sushi the ordinary way and expect to keep doing it.
But Montreal has built a run of vegan sushi restaurants that are not doing what I assumed vegan sushi was doing, which is making a worse version of something else. After a few meals at Ohana, Sushi Momo and Bloom, I think they are onto something, and I have started ordering it by choice rather than to be accommodating.
The reason it works is the constraint
A good piece of fish does most of the work for a chef. It has the texture, it has the fat, it has the flavour. Put it on rice and get out of the way. That is the whole discipline, and when it is done well there is nothing better.
Take the fish away and none of that arrives for free. Every bit of it has to be built: the texture out of something marinated or pressed or smoked, the richness out of a sauce, the salt out of something cured. The kitchen cannot coast.
What you get is food with far more going on in it. There are five things in each piece instead of two, and they were all decided on deliberately.
What it actually looks like
Not like sushi pretending to be sushi. The plates come out looking like somebody enjoyed themselves.
Rolls wrapped in overlapping avocado, or in black rice, or in a thin yellow sheet instead of nori. Puffed pearls scattered over the top for crunch. Marinated vegetables cut and laid to read as fish without anybody pretending you will be fooled. Herb sauces poured across the plate. Flower petals, which I would normally roll my eyes at, and which here are doing an actual job on a plate that is otherwise all green and dark.
The word for it is playful. Fish sushi at its best is serious, and that seriousness is the point. This is the opposite and it is not trying to compete.
The three
Sushi Momo is the one people name first, and it earns it.
Ohana and Bloom are both worth going out of your way for, and between the three of them you could eat vegan sushi in this city for a week without repeating yourself.
Worth knowing
Vegan does not mean gluten free. Soy sauce is brewed with wheat, and a good deal of what makes these plates work is a sauce. Tempura and some of the crunchy toppings are wheat too. Ask, the way you would anywhere, and bring your own tamari if you want to use it without thinking about it.
Would I stop eating fish
No. But I have stopped thinking of this as the version you order when someone else at the table cannot eat fish, which is what I thought it was.
It is its own thing, and Montreal is unusually good at it.