Came downtown this past Friday for a girls night and didn't realize it was a parent's weekend. With…read morethat being said, most places required a reservation or you had an 1.5h wait ahead of you. After a little wandering around we found liquid ginger. The line wasn't too long inside, so we decided we would try it. They were swamped and very busy still, but the staff was doing their best to accommodate everyone. We waited in a short line for maybe 15min before reaching the hostesses table. We were lucky to get seats at the sushi bar! The interior is very nice and has a nice vibe. This place is really great for nice dinners, nights out, or a good dinner. Service was definitely off that night. Our water specifically seemed to forget about the group of us since we were seated at the sushi bar. It took her 15 to get us waters and our other drinks didn't even come out until after we got out food (a considerable time later). Like I said it was busy, the sushi bar was swamped with orders, but they were working diligently to keep up with the influx of orders. Most of us ordered sushi, so we ended up waiting a considerable amount of time for our meals. My one friend ordered an entree from the kitchen and it came out within 10 minutes of her ordering it. Our sushi was served about 20-30 minutes after her dish. This is frustrating and slightly awkward as my friend felt bad eating while the rest of us didn't have any food yet. Again, this is no fault to the sushi chefs. They were working extremely hard to produce quality sushi for all the guests. My problem came with our server, Emma. She didn't check in on us at all, didn't even serve our dishes to us, and like I said, forgot to get us drinks, etc. While this was frustrating, I do not think this is a reflection of the restaurant overall. It appeared the other serves were fine keeping up with their tables.
For the food, we started with the crab rangoons and steamed pork potstickers. These came out within 10 minutes of ordering and were great starters! They each included 6 pieces per order. The crab rangoons were stuffed with ample amounts of cream cheese and crab meat. They were perfectly crispy and I thought these were some of the better Rangoons I've had. The potstickers hit the spot, but weren't anything too special, pretty standard. For my sushi, I ordered the Golden Apple Roll (per our servers recommendation) and a daily special roll called the bonzai Roll. The golden apple roll included spicy crunchy salmon, Fuji apples, mango, and mango sauce. This was decent and something different but not my favorite. 5)3 flavors were super unique but there wasn't a sweetness at all oddly like I was expecting. Instead it had a distinct tart flavor to it. Different, but not my vibe. Now the bonzai roll was a hit! This roll included tuna, salmon, kani, and avocado inside, topped with tuna, salmon, yellowtail, and mayo, then flamed & torched, and finished with eel sauce, caviar, and scallions. There was certainly a lot going on in this one, but I could really taste all the different elements. The fish was extremely fresh and just divine. I also tried some of my friend's sashimi and was blown away with the quality of the fish--just amazing.
Overall, we all loved the food here and would 100% return. The quality is quite good and the fish is melt in your mouth. You can tell they take a lot of pride in their sushi and it is evident in the taste and presentation alone. Now the service was certainly more desirable. I understand it was a very busy night, but our server just appeared to forget about us. Very disappointing as it slightly spoiled our experience and was not a good first impression. Again, we all agreed that we thought it wasn't a fair assessment of the restaurants service overall. I'm hoping next time the service is better and our server can do a better job serving us and checking in on us. I'm also surprised that she never offered to compensate anything in our bill, like our drinks that took 30+ minutes to come out and were served well after we had received our food. But it's not the end of the world. I would still recommend coming here, I actually think their sushi is better than Dragon Flys, better priced, and dare I say higher quality!
