This restaurant takes the biscuit. It is as fake and theatrical a performance as a bad high school play. A school play that likely rakes in an astounding box office return. This based on my sole, one and only, never to be repeated visit.
It was literally packed to the rafters. I'd love to look into the how or why this calculated, shabby barn set of a restaurant got any juice but it's clearly there. Fake news? Some gastronomic alternative facts? Who knows. Regardless, it was packed. PACKED. Something, the owners, cast and back stage crew are very clearly taking full advantage of. But wait... think about it... Why not? One can hardly blame anyone in a tourist town for taking in droves of clearly eager, mostly moneyed tourists eager to be seen but blithely carefree of being taken culinary and financial advantage of.
For sure, customers at this joint are literally being robbed on an hysterically ridiculous level of cost to quality with what amounts to fast food items and mildly alcoholic mixed drinks that all taste the same. This is a ludicrously overpriced restaurant.
How? Why? The poor quality food and abominable service is glaringly obvious. It's not like they had Ibiza like touts on the sidewalk dragging in inebriated pedestrians. No flashing of photo menus in the faces of semi-plastered passing tourists.
Nope. The legion of younger, mostly good looking, (albeit some face tattooed) painfully fashionable, skin tight, lycra coated women accompanied by basement gym muscled dudes with the ubiquitous shaved heads were not there under duress or sleight of hand. They were there to be seen by each other. All the while unquestionably emptying their pockets for what amounts to fast food masquerading as cuisine. All without a single visible or verbal complaint.
Those fabulous looking Gold Coast customers drove themselves there like lemmings to a cliff face. Practically lining up to scarf bogus Japanese cuisine. A cuisine, under normal circumstances rooted in a deeply cultural heritage of preparation and application of time honored ingredients. Not to mention actual indigenous Japanese involvement.
This place however, is a high school, Circ du Solei version a theatrical smorgasbord of Japanese wannabe cuisine. Spectacle over substance or quality. Supermarket popcorn shrimp and (surprisingly small) slivers of raw salmon perched on wads of weirdly sticky rice like tiny orange toupees. Edamame coated in a brown sauce so slippery as to make extracting a bean a personal triumph, (followed by a lot of wiping). A trio of beef tenderloin dishes arrived at one point. One possibly slapped once or twice but so raw as to defy being actually fired. Another sorta medium rare and the last as well done as a slab of terra-cotta. How does this happen? They were ordered and arrived at the same time? When questioned... the teenaged waiter (was that a stick on mustache?) Honestly appeared to think for a second but eventually pronounced he had no idea. He then departed without resolution. Never to be seen again. No doubt his mother was waiting in the car outside.
We were a large table (12 people) and as such, forced... and I mean forced (there was no option, as per management) to restrict ourselves to a single choice of fixed menu. Party groups beware. There is also only one large table to accommodate you. In line with the high school play decor this appears to be a repurposed undersea telephone cable reel. Likely worked over by the school's under 12 woodworking class. A massive semi circular wooden spindle of a table with a hole in the center into which a large dead tree has been wedged. I kid you not. This tree, (possibly a large branch) is literally in the way of everything. You cannot communicate with your opposite without either leaning at an awkward angle or possibly, out of frustration, climbing onto one of the heavily varnished and sticky branches. Either way it's an eyesore and little more than an inconvenient way to stop things from disappearing into the large center hole. Oh, and don't get me started on the disco level of tinny music emanating from the rusty ceiling mounted speakers. To give them credit, the back stage staff did turn off the one pointed right at the center of our group, thank God.
Anyway. I ramble on. At the end of the day it was a kind of interesting experience. Good people watching. Marginal food. Tiny helpings. Highly overpriced. In retrospect, less like the high school play referenced above but perhaps more like going to an old school Carney fun fair. The kind your parents warned you not to visit. Something potentially salacious and exciting that left you feeling sort of fleeced, a tad incredulous but mildly amused at your own naivety. A fan dance striptease with a nipple pastie finish, so to speak.
Needless to repeat...but not a visit to be repeated. A conclusion only reinforced by the almost $2,000 final bill, (no apologies or deductions for innumerable in-edible's). read more