This is the first time I ever felt the need to leave a review after visiting a restaurant. What I'm going to leave down below is from experience of having worked in this field. I'm sorry if there are those of you who love this restaurant, but that was not what I had experienced and what good is going to a restaurant that's inconsistent with it's level of taste/service/cleanliness?
1. Sushi rice was cold/too sticky/not sour/mashed together. This happens when you use sushi rice that had been made long time ago. Rice cools down and vinegar slowly evaporates away. Because the cold rice is much stickier, it becomes much more difficult to spread it on seaweed and ends up getting mashed. Relatively fresh batch of sushi rice doesn't stick together as much, and is much easier to form into proper sushi shape. When you try to do this with cold rice, you would have to squeeze much harder to shape it to the form you want.
All of the issue mentioned above wouldn't be a big issue had I walked in at the end of day, but I had walked in 2 hours after they opened! By law you can only use a single batch for maximum of 4 hours, and I know from experience that rice stays warm enough to form/spread/work with for much longer than 4 hours. Where did they get this batch of rice they served me with?
2. Salad dressing was much too salty/excessively used. Again, maybe not a potentially big issue. But how can you serve something without knowing how it tastes? Dressing itself was way too salty and whoever put it on my half-dead salad didn't have a clue as to how salty it was and ended up flooding my plate. Perhaps an honest mistake from whoever made the particular batch I had, maybe not.
3. Tonkatsu was overcooked/had been sitting inside a freezer for a while. I'm sure most of you guys know what happens to meat that stays inside a freezer for a long time. They get discolored and dry.
There aren't many places where they make tonkatsu fresh when ordered, it's very impractical. So it is quite common practice to make a large batch of them and freeze them for later use, but the one I was served had been left frozen for far too long.
4. Fish. Chefs generally cut the fish into slices and arrange them on plates inside the sushi case, as many of you have already seen, so that they are readily available when needed. When you do this you get left with a small piece that you can't use for sushi. These pieces end up being chopped up and used for salad/chirashi/roll toppings and such. The chef who made my dish used said stumpy piece of fish for a sushi. There is a trick were you slice it almost all the way through and stretch it to make it look like a regular piece. I've done this myself several times, but only as roll toppings. I had also ordered a rainbow roll. You could have totally used that stumpy piece for a roll topping instead. I could understand if it was near closing and they were running low, but it was 2 hours after you opened!
Also, on a side note. Whenever you guys go to a sushi place where they use bamboo leaf as a decoration underneath your order, mess it up so that they can't wash them and reuse them. Yes, it is a thing that some disreputable places do and yes, it is highly unsanitary. You can sometime tell by looking at the curvature of the leaf. If it looks like it's been trimmed, it probably has been to make it look "new".
Being served questionably old rice, possibly from the day before, along with a stumpy piece of fish that had been stretched miserably on top of what felt like rice-cake, on top of a bamboo leaf completely ruined it for me.
Not one, not a single dish that I was served was satisfactory.
The only good thing that I can say about this place was how nice and responsive the server was. Then again, the place was quite empty.
Only reason why I haven't gave it a one-star is to give them the benefit of the doubt.
If what I have experienced isn't how this restaurant normally is, management better step up their game to improve consistency. Kitchen staff/sushi chefs doing half-ass job in maintaining quality and consistency is a classic sign of disgruntled employees. read more