Life is tough when you have a baby that just won't sleep. My wife and I wanted to go out to dinner after our son went to sleep. (Just so there's no confusion, his grandparents were watching him!) Finally, two hours after the process started, he went to sleep. So we had the task of finding an open, decent restaurant at 9:30 at night in the Friendswood, Pearland, Clear Lake area.
Michiru was one of the only places open after 9 that had a pretty good rating, so we decided to try it. Overall, it was okay but not great, and there are just too many good sushi places in Houston to give it more than two stars, unfortunately.
The good: the seaweed salad was fresh, crunchy, and had green apple matchsticks, so it was a win. It was very close to a typical seaweed salad but with a twist.
The philadelphia roll was fresh and our favorite roll.
The cocktails were inexpensive. My wife had something called the Texas Tumbler (Texas Twister?) consisting of Tito's, St. Germain, Grapefruit, and soda for $7.
The atmosphere was nicer than I'd expected. The lighting and color scheme made dinner feel more like a date and less like escaping the baby for an hour.
The bad: service was awkward. It wasn't terrible, just kind of off-putting. We ordered an appetizer that came on a large plate (lettuce wraps), and the sushi came out very quickly, before we were even halfway through the app. There really wasn't enough room on the table, and the waitress was holding two large plates of sushi, so we had to rearrange things. Again, not a big deal, but just a little awkward. The waitress also didn't seem to be well-trained. We asked her about recommendations or different items on the menu, and she would read over my shoulder to see what the menu said and then repeat it back to me. After we were finished, my wife and I were in the middle of a conversation when she came up to ask us for the check (which was good because we'd been trying to get the check for about ten minutes). But then she cleared the table while we sort of awkwardly paused our conversation. Again, it's a small thing, but she could have just grabbed two plates in a much shorter amount of time or just waited for us to leave since we were obviously ready to go.
The food was generally okay. The lettuce wraps were pretty standard. The sweet potato tempura roll was sadly bland, and the Waikiki specialty roll was a big letdown. It was topped with strips of mango, but the texture of the mango was off. Not sure if it had been previously frozen or slightly dried, but the texture just didn't work. Then, the roll was drizzled with an overly-sweet mango syrup that tasted more like canned mangoes than anything else. We thought the roll might be better without any mango at all, so we took it off, and it was terribly bland and not edible.
In a nutshell: Next time I need a sushi fix, I'll try a different restaurant. If I come here again, I'll fill up on seaweed salad and drinks. read more