It was off to a good start, but everything went downhill very quickly…read more
1 star for the service. The server was very attentive and responsive. But maybe that's because I was the only customer in the restaurant at 12:30 pm. Should have known that was a bad sign.
I started with the miso soup which was on point. Generous portions of seaweed and soft tofu. Perfect flavor, as if they started with a homemade dashi and excellent miso paste.
Everything else was not good.
The mini lumpia - it was fried well, I'll give them that. The sauce was a little off, not the traditional sweet and sour sauce that accompanies lumpia. The filling was mostly soggy, over cooked cabbage. It tastes like there was also mashed potato inside the lumpia. Overall, this is not a good dish.
The salad has avocado. Yum. But they dressed it with honey mustard! Where is the traditional yummy Japanese salad dressing? Even if they had subbed in thousand island, which I've seen before, that would have been better. But plain honey mustard? No thank you. I took two bites and left the rest.
Onto the main event - unagi nigiri and a California crab roll. The unagi - I really couldn't figure out what was going on with it. I bit into it but couldn't chew through it. I spit it back out, and it looked like thick fatty skin, but skin should be edible. Puzzling. To be honest, I really don't know what I was eating. It was disgusting.
The California crab roll lists its ingredients as crab, avocado, pickled cucumber, and tamago. Imagine my surprise when I got it and it was imitation crab, not real crab! How can you list the ingredients and name it in a way that's completely false advertising?! And the pickled piece was not cucumber at all: it was pickled daikon! The entire roll is a lie.
This restaurant is located across form the famous cathedral. Maybe I got fooled into another tourist trap? In any case, the food was so terrible that I'm still hungry and will probably go to the McDonald's across the way. Sadness.