I'll say first that the craving is what drove my group here the other night, and as far as meeting expectations and hitting the spot, it did the trick. Is it my favorite go-to spot now? Probably not. We had a variety of items - sushi, bento, hibachi, so we got a broad sense of the menu even though there is so much menu left to try, of course. The sushi was alright - I can't put my finger on what, but the California roll didn't taste quite the way you expect. It tasted like it should but something was missing or a component was a different quality than other restaurants use. Regardless, the soups/salads were actually really great and had a lot of flavor. A far cry from what you expect with the 'soup/salad that comes with my junk' routine you know and love from hibachi places. No bland broth here, so I am compelled to maybe try the ramen everyone is raving about. The food tasted just fine overall and it wasn't anything sensational or terrible. The service was really, really slow. For being one of two tables there, it felt like years passed in between visits from our server and we did get a little antsy to go when we sat long enough.
The one thing I will conclude with, and I don't want to spoil this for anyone else - is that before even leaving the restaurant I felt the familiar wave of food poisoning. Possibly the quickest/record time of my life, but once you've been struck with this luck you remember that feeling forever. I hadn't eaten much that day after lunch and this was a good 7 hours later; I was in misery as we were leaving. Lunch was a salad and a bottle of water, so I think I survived that meal unscathed although obviously I was pretty hangry by dinnertime. I don't have any food allergies or history of intolerance, despite having had a similar experience elsewhere at a hibachi place in recent history. I suspect it was undercooked food in that case (hindsight is 20/20 right? trust your gut, people.).
Otherwise, I eat shrimp and raw tuna regularly, and have been to many hibachi and sushi restaurants (too many, it's my favorite, so let's leave it at 'many' times in my life) without incident. I've seen a physician who ruled out anything suspicious aside from my crappy a$$ luck. It seems 2021 is the year of the bad juju for me. The last two hibachi places though - almost instant onset or gradually building misery shortly thereafter: bending over, rocking back and forth like a psycho clutching my outsides wishing I was clutching my insides to calm them down, nearly-doing-Lamaze, begging to be left for dead kind of fate. This could mean my days of eating at hibachi may be numbered or I need to pray first, or perhaps my food has been undercooked or touching undercooked food near it (possible, hibachi is usually prepared on one surface), there was a bacterial invader, improperly stored/prepared food, I am unluckiest person on earth....the list of possibilities continues, but it was not a fun experience for the rest of the night and the only trigger was eating.
So, the wide possibilities of of this trigger, seeing as it was a lot of raw fish, communally cooked foods or stored foods, point to something during the meal either just not being what it was supposed to or a brand new and selective food intolerance that only manifests when I enter these dining circumstances......the latter seems far fetched, but I will stop short of saying they gave me food poisoning as an indictment. I may have the worst luck in the world but I will err on the side of attributing some % of the aftermath on the possibility it's a strange anomaly with 0 blame but the universe. read more