GyuDonYa

Really good beef bowl, especially with the mayo and chili sauces. Solves lunch in under $ 10. Awesome!

Stay away from this place. The quality of the food is so bad. The beef donburi that I ordered is microwaved. The bowl is hot but the beef is cold. The bottom of the bowl is filled with fluid sogging up the rice, making it impossible to eat. Even the frozen food you buy at the supermarket is better than this. This is the worst restaurant I have ever been to.

GyuDonya has changed quite a bit since my last visit. It seems that they have a new menu now.
I first came to this place out of pure curiosity and hunger with some friends while we were downtown and the place seemed interesting. I usually would order the salmon bowl and it was just the right size for me. And they also used to offer unlimited mayo.
I recently visited this place again the other day and seems that they’ve now added tapas and ramen. I ordered a chirashi don and my boyfriend had a miso ramen and we shared edamame and two croquettes. For the price it wasn’t too bad considering their portion sizes seem a bit bigger than what I remember them to be. However the chirashi don probably only deserves a ³⁄₅ for lack of variety since it only had salmon, tuna, and I believe squid. Not much assortment there but nonetheless still tasted very good. I would definitely come back again here as it is a neat cozy place for a quick bite.

Less than average place for a rice bowl, which is all they have. While the food they serve is what I would consider ‘Asian fast food’, the price is too high for the quality.

Boring.
Really not much flavour. And overpriced for quality and portions.
The kalbi don’s flavour vaguely reminded me of a big mac.

**TERRIBLE!**
I pass infront of this place all the time and never stop in.
Today I decided to give it a try, boy was I ever disappointed!
I ordered the gyudon and a house salad. The gyudon was OK and well priced but where the restaurant REALLY fell short was with the house salad. This miniscule bowl of greens was more like a bowl of dressing with a few leafs of lettuce in it. WAY too strong of a flavor to eat. The worst is the cook was sitting 10 feet away behind the kitchen window and looking at me the whole time, like he didn’t notice me shaking my chopsticks a zillion times in the hopes of removing excess dressing…
When the waitress came and asked me how everything was, I showed her the salad bowl which I had taken one bite of and showed her the pool of dressing at the bottom and said it was way too much for my liking. They still charged me three bucks for that sad attempt at a salad.
Needless to say, with all the other Japanese options in the area, I will never go back there.
PS I was forced to give them at least one star because I would have given zero if that option had been available.

Gyoza here is one of the best in Vancouver. Ramen and stone bowl are delicious. Prices are reasonable, its worth eating here. Around $ 12 per person if two people eat and share food.

Nice little place, pretty busy for Saturday lunch, but turnover’s quick so we got seated right away. I can’t speak to their bowls since we just got some tapas, but those were quite good!

Terrible and made me ill. Had the salmon bowl and takoyaki then spent the next couple of hours in the toilet. Avoid.

This is the kind of food that Japanese people have on their daily basis (no, it’s not sushi!!).
It reminds me of some of the quick — grab food (not to call it «fast food») you can find anywhere in Japan: a bowl of rice topped with some sort of meat seasoned with soy sauce.
I can’t really complain about the food, it’s pretty consistent and reasonably priced.
They also serve green tea free of charge.
I have been here a few times (they’ve been here for years now!), and I was glad to see they’ve renovated the inside to accommodate more seats.
Not fine dining, but I am happy to have this kind of food for a change (of so many sushi places!!).

Walked by and saw that it was busy so decided to try it. Not sure why this place was busy. I think because it’s so casual n people don’t feel weird eating alone in here. It has a cafeteria feel to it. Staff were nice…

On our trip to Vancouver, we were originally going to go to Japadog next door but it was unfortunately closed… We were hungry and walked a long way to get there so we wanted food right then and found GyuDonYa. I should have listened to the low review ratings on Unilocal,but my stomach told me to just eat it.
We came about 30 minutes before they were closed and so they didn’t offer anything besides their bowls. We got the salmon sashimi bowl and their beef bowl and both were so terrible. The rice was hard, the salmon was really disappointing and probably not even fresh. The beef was extra salty and cooked way overdone.
Every other restaurant we went to in Vancouver (whether it was planned or spontaneous) was SO amazing. But this one was goddamn awful

Me and the gf went here at around 7:30 for dinner and the place was quite empty. The waitress took our order and the food arrived after 20 minutes only to find out that her order was incorrect. She ordered a hot bowl but they just put it in a normal bowl. After expressing the mistake, the waitress said they could put it in a hot bowl instead of remaking it.
Food was quite bland and we had to use a good amount of hot sauce in an attempt to create some flavour.
In the end, they still charged the hot bowl price (which was more expensive than the normal bowl option). I think the only benefit would be the portion. It’s not huge but not too small either. Overall, bad experience

Possibly my worst dining experience ever. We wanted somewhere cheap and quick for lunch so we decided to check this place out. I wasn’t expecting stellar food or anything, but this was just so BAD.
The spicy miso ramen I ordered did not have any miso taste whatsoever, the egg was terrible and over cooked, the beef was hotpot style beef that was way too fatty, and the ‘spicy’ part looked and tasted like they just dumped on a ton of chili oil at the last minute. It was edible at best. Even though it was $ 8.95, I expected something better and resembling actual ramen, not whatever this was…
One of us ordered edamame and it came with wayyyyy WAYYYYYYYY wayyy too much salt on it. You could see huge globs of salt on the shells that it looked like white frosting dusted all over them — that’s how much salt there was. She asked the waitress to bring another one with no salt since this was inedible. The waitress couldn’t understand at first and finally said ‘we can’t change’. After some back and forth, she eventually relented and brought another one with no salt but I had a feeling she would charge for both (more on that later).
Not only did they ignore us the whole time, but whenever we flagged them down, they looked annoyed. We got fed up so we went up to the counter ourselves to grab the water jug to refill our glasses. When our ramens came, she walked away quickly, leaving us with a bowl of noodles with a spoon, but no chopsticks. We had to ask her to bring some chopsticks and napkins. After we were done eating, we sat around for a bit and realized they weren’t going to bring us our bill unless we asked, so we did. She asked if it was to be separate bills or all together and we requested that we have our friends on one bill and my boyfriends and I’s on another. She had this blank stare after we requested this and finally said a very slow, hesitant ‘okay…’ before walking away. A few minutes later we see her at the front till attending to other patrons while the other waitress stood beside her, NOT getting our bills. Fed up, we all got up and went to the till to pay. As expected, they charged us for 2 edamames. We explained that it was too salty and inedible and that’s why we requested a new one. The server whom we spoke earlier to replace the edamame then started to insist that we understood that whatever we ordered we would have to pay for and couldn’t get ‘changed’. It was such terrible customer service to have TWO waitresses arguing with us and insisting that we pay for an order of edamame. Are you that cheap that you can’t afford to comp a $ 2 dish?! Finally one of the servers said okay and let us pay for what we did eat. While paying, the original server again interjected and tried to tell us that she has made it clear that we couldn’t replace it. What a joke. Needless to say, I did not leave a tip, and this is actually my first time ever not leaving a tip. You can bet it was a terrible experience for me to leave a ZERO tip. Will NEVER be back.

It’s amazing how these days, our smartphones are part of our attire before we leave the house. Because of that, I felt semi-​naked when I left my hotel room. Even worse, without trusty Unilocal,how in the world would I be able to find a place to eat?!?
Ok, since we needed a Japadog (
) break, we decided to try something new. We looked around and figured this place looked good. There were no seats available inside, so we decided to order inside and wait for our food at an outside table. The wait to get the food wasn’t too long, which is great when you have cranky kids.
The food itself was decent. We ordered a Galbi Bowl and Mabo Tofu Bowl (can’t believe the tofu bowl was mine!) and some pickled vegetables to munch on. The Galbi was seasoned pretty well and the Tofu was just spicy enough. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this great, but it wasn’t bad. With all the restaurants in the surrounding areas, I doubt I will come back here any time soon. But, I wouldn’t have a problem if we ate here again in the future.

Both pork kimchi bowl and beef short ribs with rice in a hot pot taste good. Prices are about right. It’s good to have a quick lunch here at Gyudonya if you are in rush. However, the environment is not very good in summer. The restaurant is hot and humid with open windows. Mosquitos are flying around. Not sure if winter is better.
Maybe this is the only time I want to eat in this restaurant as there are many options out there.

First time eating at this restaurant.
Will never go back.
Food sucked and service sucked.
Oh, and make sure to check your bill before you pay cuz your 15% tip is already included-​very unconscious!
Plus, I don’t understand why they pretended that they were Japanese while they were speaking Korean to each other. LOL

Cheap small little place. My girlfriend and I randomly stopped by. Its decent for the price and flavour is not too bad.
I usually get their special which is the kalbi (beef short ribs) don

I’m a huge fan of donburi though this visit was a bit of a disappointment. As others have mentioned, the texture and consistency of the beef suggests that it was cooked at a previous time and simply reheated in the microwave before being served (very chewy and lukewarm). The portion itself is also a bit on the smaller side for what you order, though the whole meal does seem very homestyle. Friendly servers and employees though!

GyuDonYa was the one disappointment, of my otherwise untarnished culinary adventure through Vancouver. Everywhere else I’ve stopped has had incredibly well prepared food with generous portions and intense flavors. GyuDonYa is a cancerous weed, in Vancouver’s garden of gourmet delights.
While the cashier here was friendly, she didn’t speak English at all which made ordering difficult. Normally I take that as a bonus, as it generally ensures the food will be authentic. Unfortunately, not only were they out of several things, on their already limited menu, what they made was very bland and had skimpy portions. The «Large» beef bowl was just a shallow bed of rice with a few razor thin dry scraps of meat tossed over it and a few drops of super market bbq sauce.
As I was leaving, I noticed a swarm of black flies buzzing in and out of the kitchen. The health code implications were less than appetizing. It was cheap, and sadly, I think I still got much less than I paid for. As a plus, it was very fast, and they gave me my food to go just a minute after I paid. So if you want a small quantity, of bad food, fast, GyuDonYa is the place for you!