The restaurants here are good, except when they aren't. Tonight (Christmas Day, Dec 25), we had…read morebooked an overnight stay with a Nagi three-course dinner, and all of the courses, service, and English spoken were a bit lacking. The last at least brought some amusement, as we puzzled over what we had just been presented, as the first waiter left us to ponder our options: three courses, any you like, all served together, unless it's a dessert, the ramen Finnish. My partner had surmised that ramen would be served as a finisher, I that it was some Finnish peculiarity in the ramen department. When we ordered genmaicha tea, from another waiter, we heard that genmaicha also Finnish, concluding that they had actually run out of both, and that both waiters spoke the same brand of pidgin English. How does a Japanese restaurant ever run out of tea, though?! Later overhearing another table that ordered in Swedish, we also confirmed that yes, "X finish" indeed meant they had run out of X.
We ordered the duck breast, chicken skewers, oizushi sushi, moriawase sushi, sorbet, and pannacotta, and a cucumber flavoured sparkling drink. These people do not know what a pannacotta is -- it was some very disappointing dense sponge cakes, over-whipped cream almost turned butter, ketchup-spritzeled with raspberry sauce. The soda was at best a palate cleanser, and all but one of the moriawase sushi piece types (three kinds, two each, plus the four oizushi pieces) were boring. The other dishes were a bit overpoweringly umami-savoury; much too heavy for the companion rice dish. Service took forever.
The baths are nice, and the lighting somehow makes all the brutalist concrete look quite lovely. We also attended a stellar sound journey held in English, after attendees were polled for "anyone not speaking Swedish?", and us raising a hand.
The rooms are nice and functional, but the bedding less soft than the lovely bamboo ones they sell in one of the companion stores.
