Decor - 5/5 Somewhat like you're outdoors at a post-industrial Italian chateau. Love it. Excellent play between light and shadow.
Service - 5/5 Our server was friendly, helpful and not overly intrusive. The manager, noting that we were clearly unhappy with our meal, kindly declined to charge us for the meal. Walking out of a restaurant is an exceptionally rare circumstance for me, and it was very unfortunate that we had to do it here.
Unfortunately we found the food itself extremely overhyped. Asian-inspired, perhaps, but white-washed into oblivion. "Fusion" would be one thing, but much of what we ordered were simply traditional modern Asian dishes made faster and less expensively than you might find in a traditional restaurant. Evidently this kind of chicanery fools most customers.
Tuna Tartare - 3/5 Tuna tartare served with puffed rice and sesame crackers. The crackers themselves were excellent. Unfortunately, the tuna, while fresh, was largely tasteless on its own, indicating that a low fat content (read: cheaper) tuna was used in this dish. In an apparent attempt to make up for that, the center of the tartare included Japanese pickles, which are great, but absolutely do not belong in the dish. The pickle flavor seeped into the nearby tuna, ruining it. Had this been made with a fattier tuna, and no pickles, it could have been excellent. Unfortunately, apparent cost-cutting measures by the restaurant made it mediocre at best.
Pork and Truffle Soup Dumplings - 1/5 Confusing. Extremely thick skin. Great, very porky filling. Soup tasted very close to Campbell's beef and vegetable, and there wasn't much of it due to the thick skin. The manager indicated that they do these by machine, not by hand. While I understand that as a cost cutting measure, what you're looking for in a soup dumpling is traditionally thin skin and gentle but flavorful soup which pairs well with the meat. The soup itself was extremely out of place, and the skin was extremely thick. No truffle flavor identified. Skip.
Kimchi Kimbap - 1/5 Just wrong. Kimbap is a traditional Korean street food that is served like a sushi roll. It has specific ingredients that go in it. Sometimes, you might see the fishcake replaced with bulgogi (or here, allegedly kimchi), but the basic ingredients are something of a constant: carrot, egg, burdock, cucumber, pickled radish. Instead of egg, we got a second strip of pickled radish. The burdock was replaced with arugula to cut costs. No kimchi flavor at all was detected. This resulted in the balance of flavors being just...wrong.
Unagi Nigiri - 1/5 A straightforward standard dish, ruined. Unagi is eel served with a four ingredient sauce: sake, mirin, sugar, soy sauce. The sauce was overwhelmingly salty. As best we can tell, Modita forwent the normal sauce to serve it dressed with pure soy sauce, ruining the dish.
We also tried two cocktails. Can't recommend either:
Onyx Sands - 2/5 Listed ingredients: Coffee Infused Cimarron Reposado, Cynar 70, Orgeat, Lime, Pineapple, Sesame. Cocktail is not balanced. The only detectable flavors are a coffee foretaste and a strong cigarette-butt aftertaste. If there was any lime, orgeat or pineapple present in our drink, it was undetectable.
Nekojita - 2/5 Listed ingredients: Coconut Infused Soju, Campari, Rayu Mezcal, Strawberry, Lemon, Lychee-Lotus Shrub. Again, this cocktail was not balanced. The only things we could detect were sweetened mezcal (third ingredient) and a mediated campari. These latter two ingredients drowned the flavor of everything else out. read more