Ate here for Saturday night dinner with the parents after a recommendation from a family friend. Worst mistake ever.
Right when we opened the front door, I smelled that yakitori/grill smell--the small restaurant was FILLED with this bbq smell. If you're sensitive to smokey smells, I would advise you to bring a mouth mask--yes, it's THAT smokey. Arrived a few minutes after it opened at 6PM and the hostess immediately told us that we would have to finish eating by 7:30PM because of the next reservations. That was the first turn-off of the night! I understand you want to make money and maximize your sales, but keep that information to yourselves!
We sat at a small table next to a couple of large parties, and our server gave us some steamed towels to wipe our hands--that reminded me of my childhood days when airlines used to hand us warm towels on international flights! That was such a unique part of their service that made me smile. The room is very small, I'd say with a max occupancy of less than 50 people. During dinner time, the atmosphere can even be described as romantic/intimate, but we had little kids in between our table so the environment was quite family-friendly.
Food-wise, we started off with the daikon mochi balls (friend's recommendation), grilled squid, and sashimi salad. After we realized that the plates were on the smaller size, we told another server we wanted a bowl of ramen as well. The Japanese food here is legit, I will hand it to Ajito...meaning that they do lots of small bites and detailed preparation for their food. Ajito is a small business with what I would describe as "well-crafted dishes" and small bites--I wouldn't recommend coming here if you were on a budget and starving. Portion sizes here are small and definitely not your Americanized type of sushi place.
Speed of service and organization are the main points I need to highlight during our experience. Our small sake also took a while to be delivered at the start of our experience, and every plate we ordered came out after 5 minutes of waiting...not bad! I totally understand because the plates are created with care and detail from the chefs. However, after we had the chirashi salad and the mochi balls, we sat at our empty tables for a WHOLE 30 minutes until we finally asked a frantic server (there were 4 servers running around the small shop, but none of them would pause to tell us what was going on with our last two dishes!) what was up with our grilled squid?! We reminded him that we also ordered a ramen and kindly asked if he could check the status of our orders. He promptly brought over our grilled squid and told us that we never put in an order of ramen :\ that was a disappointment.
It seems like everybody else here has had great experiences with Ajito, but I'm not gonna sugarcoat my service-lacking dinner. I was pretty bummed that my parents were not satisfied with this place, and we all agreed we wouldn't come back here again. Ajito seems like a place for people who don't mind waiting around for their food, having lots of drinks/down time with other diners. But if you're in a rush, or are super hungry...you will definitely be forced to wait and probably wonder what's up with your orders. Pricing is on the higher side with our salad being $9 and small sake at $7, just as examples, but I will say that their quality of foods is pretty great. Too bad service that Saturday, and the flow of the experience was totally not okay. read more