My bf and I came to this place to get sushi for dinner our last night in Sesimbra. There was an…read moreAsian man standing outside the restaurant, so I was hoping this place would be authentic.
We chose to sit inside, but by the open entrance, so we had a fabulous view of the sunset over the beach. The menu said sushi a là carte... which to me, a là carte means you order each dish separately and pay per dish. But there were no prices listed next to any of the dishes in the menu when we looked inside.
At least everything had pictures, so we just pointed to the items we wanted, and the man took our orders. I saw Calpis on the menu and was excited, because usually only very authentic Japanese places have Calpis. I love Calpis. The woman taking our drink orders (maybe the wife or sister?) got really confused. What?? How can they not know what is on their own menu?!
After some momentary confusion, she was able to bring out my drink. It was much sweeter than I remembered from previous experiences other countries, and I didn't like this drink that much. I thought it should be the same everywhere--like Coca-Cola--but could there possibly be different formulas? Dunno, because my drink came in a glass, so I didn't get to see the original bottle or can it came from.
I'm sorry to say that the sushi was HORRIBLE. It was ALL RICE. I mean, I've seen sushi in the past that was filled with rice, but this was completely ridiculous. Minuscule amounts fish and SO much rice as filler.
The tempura was also very disappointing. In California, it usually also includes sweet potato, green beans, etc., but here, it only had 3 or 4 soggy pieces of shrimp and nothing else. And then there were TONS of the fried batter all over it, and the batter wasn't even golden brown. It was a sorry-looking pale yellow color.
The spring rolls were literally the size of my 4 fingers. No joke. I've never seen such tiny spring rolls in my life before.
I was getting more and more depressed as each dish came out, and normally I love sushi. It got to the point where we just ordered some prepackaged ice cream from the freezer and asked for the check. I told myself I'd rather just eat crackers in our hotel room if I got hungry later at night.
My bf and I were curious how much the final bill would be, as we had no clue how much each dish cost. When the bill came out, we were flabbergasted. Turns out the 11.90 euros for dinner was for all-you-can-eat!!! :O Now all the rice in the sushi made sense.
This was a case where because we didn't understand Portuguese, and the workers here didn't know much English, we had no idea that there was only one set price for all of the food. (Drinks and dessert were charged extra.) We should have and would have ordered way more dishes if we only would have known about the set-up.
However, I dunno if I would have wanted any more food at that point, because I was pretty depressed. At the end of the day, my bf and I had to laugh about this experience, and note that due to language barriers, this was the least amount of food we've ever had at an all-you-can-eat dinner. :P
