Delicious Japanese food. Nice table seating area and ambience. They serve Sapporo beer at the bar. Unfortunately, the staff has trouble with the English language. When I ordered, I was totally clear that the order was for 1 person. Linda, the server just made it a double order so she could get more tip; and then acted ignorantly, as though she did not understand English. The food is tasty. The eel is simply divine. The chefs who make the food are professionals. The server girls, ignorant. Please teach servers how to properly and calmly take a to-go order. Review: 5 read more

Sake Cafe - Sake Cafe: Sushi Roll and Grilled eel - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

I love this place! Always delish and everyone is so friendly. Great sushi every time.

Had a wonderful sushi dinner here. Salmon, sushi, spicy salmon roll, and a special roll with eel and salmon were beautifully presented and tasted great. Service was friendly and efficient. Restaurant has indoor and outdoor seating. read more

Sake Cafe - Specialty role with eel and salmon - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

See all

The food is amazing, me and my family go every week because they have amazing staff and even better food. The staff are very nice. I have eaten there for over 4 years and have always loved it, the food keeps getting better. My favorite roll is the monkey roll, and I highly recommend the ramen. read more

Best sushi in the capital region, amazing service and in a great location. Walking in I know I will be walking out satisfied from a great meal. read more

Shrimp shumai- delicious Eel roll & shrimp tempura- delicious Boston roll- lacking. I included a photo below, but it was mostly cucumber and lettuce. Typically I'm used to a Boston roll having a larger piece of crab, avocado and shrimp. Seems like they have a different rendition of this roll! It was still tasty, just unexpected. read more

Sake Cafe - Boston roll - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

Came here for dinner and enjoyed the sashimi deluxe (I think) and my boyfriend ordered the spicy beef ramen. The sashimi was pretty fresh and there was one white fish that they wrapped around shiso which I thought was a nice touch since I love shiso. The "ramen" was really very good, but they should consider renaming it, because it's not what we expected at all. When you see beef ramen on the menu at a sushi/Japanese-ish restaurant, you aren't expecting clearly Chinese style noodle soup with mala flavoring, which is what we got. It's more like a beef Mala noodle soup, which was really good, but that's because we happen to like that too. Service was attentive and started us with ice water as soon as we sat down. They did say it was $6 extra to switch out tuna in the sashimi combo for something else since we don't really like tuna, which was ridiculous, but I think there was some sort of miscommunication going on. Some of the special rolls looked a little overpriced but interesting. 3.5 stars and I would come back to try other things for sure read more

Sake Cafe - 5. Sashimi Deluxe - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

Not sure what some guy is saying about the waitress Linda.... Have been going to Sake for 20 years??? Linda is the nicest most pleasant most hard working woman you could ever meet... her English is great... her dedication and generosity is second to none... you can complain about whatever you want... but leave Linda out of it... she's a treasure read more

Awesome place with excellent attentive service! Had the best chicken satay served with a delicious peanut sauce, a green paper roll, and tofu pad Thai ( I wanted to try everything!) Everything was amazing, not greasy, fresh. The pad Thai was probably the best I've had! Cannot wait to return! read more

Sake Cafe - 3. Green Paper Roll - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

Got salmon and California roll from here, along with the green salad to-go. Very soon after finishing I got nauseated and then was on the verge of vomiting for about half an hour, then I did vomit. This is especially bad because I was at work. I'm not allowed to come into work tomorrow and I had to lose 2 hours of work today. All the vomit was undigested Asian food. Every time I blew my nose for several hours undigested Asian food would also come out. DO NOT EAT HERE! read more

I have been to this restaurant 4 times now and each time it is amazing. The food is consistently good and the wait staff is pleasant and polite. This restaurant served my food incredibly quickly despite me being there during there lunch special hours. Tgere lunch special of sushi and sashimi is cheap but great! read more

Excellent sushi. Best black pepper chicken I'd ever had. Prompt service for a Saturday evening. Wonderful presentation. Menu was a touch spendy for my taste, but the food was worth every penny. read more

Sake Cafe - 1. Sushi - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

See all

I returned to this small dimly lit restaurant for a seat at the sushi bar / alcohol bar (photo). The specials menu on the back wall listed an extremely good price for toro - not sure if it was going to be ohtoro or (more likely) chutoro, but I'll order it either way. Despite other reviews you may have read, Sake Cafe has had their liquor since at least December 2017. Behind their bar was sake, beer, wine and a few liquor bottles. The official website to check any NYS liquor license is: https://sla.ny.gov/public-license-query (usually good within about 30 days). I looked through the menu while Japanese pop music lingered in the background over the muted television news. The music was appropriate, considering the cartoonish sushi mural along one entire wall. The staff was changing from lunch menu to dinner, so I watched the servers change over all the other place settings from paper to cloth napkins about five minutes after I ordered a couple of small rolls and eight nigiri. The servers were attentive enough, and pretty quick, but the restaurant was barely occupied. This meant that the one chef had no other distractions when he had to finish the piece he forgot to make, just as I realized it was missing. Small mistakes might be forgiven during a Saturday night rush, but not if there is only one order ticket to prepare. The soup was presentable, and the rice was well flavored, but the overall presentation of the main was uneven. I never did like artificial decorations, such as the drink umbrella and little blue neon light used on my plate under the shredded diakon. The maki were pleasant, but the nigiri needed some work, though the taste was acceptable, even without wasabi under each piece of fish. For the individual pieces, the slice of mackerel was broken into several unappetizing pieces atop the rice (photo). The very small scrap of nori seaweed around the nigiri of the egg custard and the tiny grilled eel did not wrap all the way around to secure the item to the rice. But at least it was decorative. These may seem like petty concerns, but presentation and interaction with the chefs has always been a huge part of my experience. I am sure I'll return soon, but it seems as if only a few very small things are holding them back from their potential. 2019 01 03. S23. read more

Sake Cafe - Maki: spicy salmon, eel cucumber.  Nigiri: maguro, hamachi, hirame, saba, toro; unagi, tamago, ikura. 2019 01 03. S23. - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

See all

I absolutely love Sake for Cafe. It's close to my house. My favorite dishes are coconut shrimp and tuna pancake. Both a little pricy but worth it. read more

Overall the fried dishes we got were too well done stingy on the protein. The staff was ready to help take our dish/take more orders but were not friendly. It was a weird time there. read more

We order from here at least once a week for the last several years. The sushi is fresh and the hot dishes have a lot of flavor. Best crab rangoons too! read more

Sake cafe is right next to another very good sushi place that I like, so I have been wondering for a long time, why I haven't I been here? I went to go have sushi at the place next door around 4 PM when I realized they weren't open so I said, alright lets try this other place. Now I am even more confused as to why I hadn't been there yet and also more able to understand why Albany has been able to support to sushi restaurants right next to each other for a long time, because they're both very good ! I usually like to get two or three simple sushi roles, because I am not a fan of there being too many flavors in sushi at a time. But this time I decided to try one of the specialty roles. I got the Spicy Girl roll, which interestingly was not spicy, but it was really very good. It had a lot of flavor and textures that worked well together. It was salty so it didn't feel like it needed soy sauce, or at least not very much. Every time I eat at an Asian restaurant I get Hot and Sour soup because its one of my favorite things. The hot and sour soup at Sake was pretty good. It had a nice sourness and the mushrooms in it were really fresh and good, however, it lacked in that thickness hot and sour soup usually has and could have maybe used a little something sweet. Overall,Sake Cafe was great! Give it a try :) read more

I'm so glad they're open again for delivery soon we'll be able to enjoy a dinner inside

Decent sushi for area, but recent delivery was AWFUL (Grub hub) today. Overall miss the quality; Makes me miss NYC and BOS despite lower prices in the area. Also, not every Asian location is pan-Asian. For shaaaame upstate NY!!!! Will return to NYC soon but was culture-shocked a bit more than I thought from the area tbh read more

Hands down, my favorite sushi restaurant in the area. The service is excellent, the fish is fresh, the daily specials are inventive, and the kitchen entrees are flavorful and consistent. This week we had a lovely meal at Sake Cafe - their special roll had shrimp tempura, avocado, and crab salad on the inside; wrapped in soybean paper and topped with eel, avocado, and spicy sauce. I can't eat raw fish at the moment, but this roll was so elevated and delicious I wasn't even that jealous of my husband's beautiful nigiri sushi plate! read more

See all

We've been coming to this place for years - never had long wait times, and the food is amazing. Shumai and sweet potato rolls are personal favorites! read more

Wouldn't deliver to me because i didn't give a tip to driver, only ordered from them once.

Cliffnotes: 5 star food with 3 star service during our visit. Very reasonable prices. This IS a BYOB establishment. When we went (party of four) it was an extremely busy Saturday night, we had a 7:45 reservation and we were seated right around then. We sat in a corner so I could see the entire place. Right off the bat the server came over and asked us for a drink order, we all got hot Tea because it was freezing out, and he returned with it. Then he ran around the restaurant completely ignoring us for about 10 or so minutes. This bothered me because he wasn't really doing anything as far as I could tell except helping bus tables and cleaning wine glasses for BYOB tables that came in after us. When he did finally return we ordered all of our food and asked for more tea. We also asked for water that we had not received (didn't ask when we ordered tea) and he informed us we would have to wait because they had run out of glasses, which is kind of amateur hour. Our appetizers- Shumai, Soups all around, a seaweed salad, and an "amazing pancake". They came out quickly in a kind of staccato pace, Seaweed salad, then 2 hot and sour soups, then shumai, then 2 more soups (tom young). The Shumai was good not great, soups were also good, the hot and sour better than the tom young. The Amazing pancake came later from the Sushi bar, it was different but rather good, a kind of sushi pizza with raw tuna, panko, japanese mayo, and shredded mango on an scallion pancake thingy. I think it was after this waters arrived in bar glasses (pilsner I believe). As dinner went the service got better. Sushi arrived next. We got Spicy Girl roll, California Roll, Rising Sun I think, and Rainbow. As noted in other reviews the Sushi was very good with excellent fish quality and preparation. We also ordered crispy duck and a chili beef, both of which were very good. Towards the end of the meal the service actually got over attentive, with the server asking us over and over (I think we counted four times) if everything was good. We will definitely be going back, hoping the service is more consistent next time. "In terms of the decor, I actually liked it. It was simple, but I did catch some decorations here and there. I actually appreciated seeing the bare, dark wood tables. All in all, the atmosphere was cozy. The only thing that seemed a little out of place to us were the big screen tvs mounted on the wall by the sushi bar. I guess if you are seated at the sushi bar you might want to watch something other than the chefs at work, but it still struck both my fiance and I as curious." - Stolen from Angela, Agreed 100% read more

Best sushi in Albany! Fresh fish, delicious hot dishes, and the staff is great. We have done both dine-in and take-out, great every time. Amazing! read more

Sake Cafe has always been my to go Asian Food Place, the services is great, outdoor seating in the summer. My favorite dish is the fried rice with beef. Also all their appetizers are delish. read more

Sake cafe was recommended by cousins and we find ourselves going there every time we are in Albany. The sushi is fresh, the staff are super friendly, and the service is great. If we can't eat in we do takeout! read more

When we walked in we couldn't decide whether to sit in the dimly lit restaurant or outdoors. We chose outdoors, which didn't have much of a view. Service was quick and we weren't forgotten about even being outside. The food was ok. The avocado salad was literally just lettuce, avocado, and dressing-- a little lackluster, something else is needed. For dinner I had the New Scotland Roll, which was delicious but not filling. I'd expect to be more filling for a roll that costs $14. The person I was with had a Rising Sun Roll that was just OK--- the eel didn't taste too fresh. We both were still hungry after our pricy rolls so we had to get a spicy tuna roll to alleviate our hunger. Honestly the spicy tuna was the best part of the meal and only $5!! read more

Sake Cafe - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

Really enjoyed the house salad here!! Service was very fast but they delivered my salad way before my boyfriends salad and then gave him wrong meal. They were very apologetic and fixed his meal but was unfortunate because I was almost finished with my food before his arrived. Spicy California roll was good. read more

Sake Cafe - Spicy California roll - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

Going down hill bad. They don't use the freshest ingredients anymore. My rolls had barely any rice on them. The soft shell crab used to be 10pieces for 8$ now it's only 5 pieces. What a rip off. I won't be back. Try Itchiban on central. They aren't as a fancy of a place but the foods better and fairly priced. Mad that I spent money here to be ripped off. I'll pay for good sushi but it's not here read more

Sake Cafe - Cheap on the rice. It's rice! Be generous - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

I come here with friends when we are craving sushi and I love that it's tucked away on New Scotland and not on the packed Washington Ave or Madison. There are always tables but still has a decent amount of people inside. The tempura shrimp & veggies is good and not too greasy, and the Kani salad is boss! Gotta love a good crab salad mix. The salmon is my fav and they turn it out well with the rolls and sashimi alike. I also like the crab rolls, cali rolls and shrimp rolls. The place is small and prices are decent for a sushi house. It's usually quiet and I can take my time to enjoy company and food. Upgrade. Not sure if they still do this or not but... they let you bring your OWN wine in!! And they open it for you! Craxy thing is, they also serve wine and beer so I'm not sure why the hell they would take the extra bucks away from themselves but I'm not complaining! I'd rather pay 10$ for a 1.5L moscato to bring in; versus 8$ for a glass. Like I said, not sure if that still stands but if so, you cannot go wrong here! read more

This place is great. The portions are great and prices are very reasonable. Take advantage of their lunch menu, I believe from 11-3. You get soup or salad, rice, and select menu items for less than $8. Their sushi is also super good, but I especially like their noodles and rice dishes like Pad Thai or different curries. read more

This place was awesome! Best cosmos I've ever had. Best shumai I've ever had. Very reasonable prices and excellent service. Can't wait to go back! read more

4 stars mostly cuz of excellent customer service! Decent sashimi but the temperature of the fish could have been colder to bring out more of the freshness taste.... We had the chirashi bowl (they have brown rice option) And the smoked salmon wrapped by squids as appetizer (not impressive)! See pics for more reference! read more

See all

I love sashimi and nigiri. This is the place! I always order take out from them. Everything is so fresh and the portion of the fishes are so generous. Really worth what you pay for. Their sushi rolls is great too. My favorite one is Snow mountain and dancing eel roll. So so good! read more

Sake Cafe - Sushi Bars Near Me - Albany, New York

Drunken noodles are the best! They used to have delicious fried fish on the menu but not anymore.

My best friend and I have been coming here a couple times a year for the past 3 years or so and I can say I've enjoyed the food here each time! We love getting pineapple rice to split and then buying sushi and getting their plum wine! The service is always great as well! We love that they serve their sushi with a flower! The pineapple at the end is always a great touch! read more

Meh sushi. Strange interior. We ordered to go and the sushi was bland. i completely miss Kuma Ani a few doors down which used to serve sushi. read more

This is the best Asian place in Albany, hands down. I am officially addicted to their steamed dumplings. It's really close to my Father's House and it literally won't cost you an arm and leg. Unfortunately it's mostly a sushi place and not really a Chinese place but I would highly recommend this place to anyone. For the best chicken teriyaki go to Ichi Ban if they're still there on Western Avenue doing take out! read more

This place made me SO HAPPY!! My boyfriend loves sushi, while I don't eat seafood, so he often ends up somewhere I can eat, too. Luckily, this place not only offers so much more than just sushi, but they have thai food! Thai is easily my favorite kind of food so I can't really put into words how excited I was. My sister recommended the place, saying its her absolute favorite. We met up with her for dinner and I seriously couldn't have been more pleased. We got chicken satays as well as crab rangoon (which I tried anyway, despite my displeasure with all things seafood) and both tasted so good. When our food came (for me a stir fry, for him sushi & general Tsaos chicken) we all ate until we could burst! It was so good that I even ended up eating my leftovers on our way home! lol On top of their incredible, fresh meals, their service was also great. The waitresses were attentive and friendly. The owner even came over to chat and was an incredibly pleasant and personable guy. Totally worth the 30 min drive from Amsterdam. I can't wait to go back! read more

Absolutely love this place!! Everything that i have ordered has tasted fresher than 99% of their competition. My favorites include any sushi item, red curry, and pepper chicken. Wait staff is very professional and fast. My last visit was for takeout and I arrived close to their closing time and they were very friendly and fast! Thanks you for being consistently awesome! read more