My wife and I love sushi. We won't be back. That's the synopsis. However, if you'd like details…read moreplease read on. I will be thorough so all may be spared the horrors of this place.
In hindsight, this whole experience reads like a horrible relationship. There were signs along the way that we should have left, but for some reason we stayed. Red flag number one; The front door. The filthy hand prints on the glass and non descript smears of god only knows what should have prompted a quick "nope" & return to vehicle. Yet we pressed on. I must say the first impressions were on par with the front door. We walked in & noticed the place was virtually empty, we figured it was about 3:00pm so it was probably an odd time and shrugged it off. Before sitting down I went to the bathroom to wash my hands from the filthy front door touching and figured I'd use it while in there. That should have been red flag number two. I won't go into detail since you're looking for a food place to dine at. Let's just say this place made the front door look palatable. I had to use soap in order to use the soap. No joke, nightmare fuel. As I escaped the panic room, I walked passed the hostess/server sitting in a booth eating some sort of soup with mussels, watching her soaps on her phone. As she sat at the table she spat something into her hand and placed it onto the pile that was on a napkin on the table in front of her. This was a practice she had clearly been doing a while as the pile in front of her indicated it was habitual. I got back to the table and this same woman quickly approached with two menus & rudely said "do you know what you want to drink?". The menu was ripped & sticky, the wallpaper around the table was pealing off the walls. This place is unclean & felt dated & uncared for. She walked away & a returned with two sprites & again rudely asked "Do you know what you want?". The answer should have been "yes, to not eat here" yet again we pressed on foolishly thinking, "maybe the food is good". We ordered some pork gyoza (grilled dumplings) to share, an Ottumwa Roll, Ninja Roll, & a Philadelphia Roll. Each of these seeming safe choices given the description in the sticky torn menu. The waitress had gone outside & returned walking passed us. The smell of smoke was so strong it was as if she blew smoke directly at us. She then sat back down in her booth where she spent the next ten minutes or more hacking a wet cough out into the room without seeming to care to cover her mouth. Again, why didn't we run? We had already ordered. Rather than be rude we waited to partake of sushi, which as I stated in the first sentence of this sad saga, we love. We should have been rude.
The food arrived. Even though I asked for no cilantro on my Ottumwa Roll, it still came with it right on top like a visible middle finger to my request. I simply removed it & moved on. My wife noticed her roll was in fact deep fried. Interesting given that the menu read "deep-fried salmon, white tuna..." which to us read that the salmon was deep fried, not the whole roll. We chalked this up to an unfortunate grammatic error in the menu & "our bad". As we prepped our dipping plates we poured the "soy sauce" & noticed it was a pale brown color almost akin to beef broth. Soy sauce is traditionally very dark, almost black. It was clear this was watered down but it could work. I'm saddened to say the watery soy sauce was the highlight of this meal. The deep fried ring on the outside of the Ninja roll was so hard it could not be eaten. It was as if someone wrapped room temperature dried-out fish inside of cardboard. My wife had to dissect the roll just to eat the part that was manageable. It was as if this roll was made yesterday then refrigerated and brought out today. The Ottumwa roll should be re-named as it is offensive to the city of Ottumwa. It should be renamed Barstow as it is dry, unpleasant, & not really a good representation of California. This roll was exactly that, only mildly resemblant of sushi. The dryness of the "spicy tuna" inside this roll was as if they had made it with sawdust. This roll tasted stale like yesterday's gas station sushi. In fact, I've eaten sushi from grocery store deli refrigerators that was more fresh & flavorful than this atrocity. The Philadelphia Roll should come with a size clause. If a standard sushi roll is the size of a silver dollar/fifty cent piece, this was the size of a nickel. I thought I was being punked. It too overly dry. Then $54 later, we left feeling violated as if leaving a bad relationship that we should have left years ago. We left & went to Menards to use their restroom to avoid any more humiliation from this place.
In truth, this was all our fault, we should have run. Now our trauma is your guide. Avoid this place. It's not good. I'm not even sure it's sushi. Frankly it's a miracle we didn't both have food poisoning, though I waited to post this until I was sure we were safe. Zero Stars.
