So just to be forthright, i created this account after our night on the town, and unfortunately my first review will not be a positive one. The star is only for the wonderful service we received once we were seated The rest of the evening was bad enough that went up north to have proper sushi and cleanse the bad taste from our mouths (both literally and figuratively ).
We arrived fairly early for a weekend night and though there were three hosts behind the counter , no one greeted or acknowledged us until we walked up to the counter and stood there vacantly staring in their direction. We had no reservation and were instructed to have a seat until they had a table ready and this is where we encountered the layer of sticky .. food? that is coating just about everything in the restaurant. The whole table was covered in this sticky goo layer, bear in mind this sticky table is in the waiting area..... we should have taken heed of this sign and abandoned all plans on dining at coast, but we didn't, we pushed on. After a few minutes of waiting we were told or table was ready, Once we sat down we all noticed that the same stickiness that we noticed in the waiting area was all around us, a thin layer of it on the table, little bits of it on the wooden parts of the chair, on the floor, on the table leg and feet and on the walls in the form of dried food splatters. I noticed one reviewer talking about ending up with food poisoning after dining here, I would imagine you could get food poisoning simply by licking your finger after touching one these goo blobs.
Our server approached and was the first friendly person we had encountered since we arrived... a breath of fresh air. We mentioned the sticky table and he came back with a towel to try to clean the table however when he was done, it was as sticky if not more sticky than it was when we first sat down.
After running through some of the specials he recommended a few appetizers to start. we took his recommendations and ordered the scallop special with the egg yolk sauce and the toro ponzu. The scallops arrived and despite more greasy/sticky fingerprints on the plate, the scallops were cooked perfectly and the citrus yolk sauce complimented the garlic flavor of the spinach nicely.
Next came the toro ponzu. Unfortunately what we received was not toro, it was a cut somewhere between akami (lean bluefin tuna) and Chutoro (medium fatty bluefin tuna). I asked the server if i had mistakenly received the wrong order and he told us that we had received the toro ponzu. I have eaten a lot of sushi in a lot of places around this globe and have never been "Scammed" like this, if you are out of toro just tell us you are out of toro don't just assume we wont know the difference and serve us a leaner (less expensive) cut when we are paying you for the most expensive cut of tuna you can buy. After this i mentally checked out on the rest of the meal and began searching my phone for proper sushi restaurant to save our evening. all i remember about the rolls was the amount of sauces, mayos and other novelty items and the lack of fish in most of their rolls, For example, the rolls were the sushi equivalent of a taco bell taco with all the sauces. it was decent but for the wrong reasons.
And then, I moved one of the large metal plates the sushi was served on, and sure enough there was MORE STICKY GOO/ FOOD STUCK TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PLATE WE JUST ATE OUR DINNER OFF OF!!! Thoroughly grossed out, we left and vowed never to come back, unless we got sick and needed to drop of a doctors bill.
We didn't go to bed hungry however, thanks to these new fangled smart-phones we found a wonderful byob sushi place in Andersonville where we found proper sushi with a warm inviting staff, and a CLEAN dining area where we finished the wine and opened up the whiskey bottle that Coast would not allow us to open.
If i could rate only the service i would give coast four stars, however the other factors literally Scared me out of ever trying this dive again.
Please Chicagoans, Find another sushi place until this one cleans up its act and learns it's fish read more