We had the $125 tasting menu, so this rating is more focused on that particular menu option.
It's stated to be 8 courses including dessert.
The first two courses were edamame and these deep fried seasoned split corn cobs. The edamame was fine, though because they were seasoned in a spicy oil, your choices were to eat them with chopsticks if you had a dexterous mouth, or fully commit and get your hands oily.
I opted for the chopsticks, but as a result maybe got 3/4 of the beans and some bean skin - not easy for me to eat.
The corn cobs were a little weird. It was like halfway between eating conventional corn on the cob and eating a BBQ seasoned corn nut. Okay, but honestly the first two courses were barely courses and not elevated in any way.
Third and fourth were a tuna crudo and a raw fish mini taco. The crudo was really good - tuna was fresh and seasoned well. The taco was small - like two bites worth (or one big bite), but good also. These were legit courses.
Five was a king salmon filet in a ginger soy sauce. It was good, but it was strange in that there were three of us and this came on only two plates. The one plate to be shared wasn't twice the size of the single and a salmon filet isn't an intuitive thing to split and share. The way we were situated wasn't such that I was even sharing with my wife.
It would have been much better to ask - "we usually put a double sized portion on a single plate for two people to share - is that okay or would everyone like to have their own plate?" Simple question and would have made everything less awkward, because once it's out there and served, you feel like the difficult customer if you say "excuse me, can you plate this separately?"
Next (six) was the nigiri course, which was awesome. Very tasty. Course was small though: 4 smaller nigiri, one uni spoon, and one thin piece of tamago cake. No complaints on quality/taste though.
Seven was a uni carbonara udon dish, which tasted pretty good, but I again found it a little strange. And no visible uni, so it was must have been subtly in the sauce. At least a bit of uni on the top would have been a nice touch.
Again, two people sharing one plate of noodles - awkward. When you have discrete pieces of ahi crudo where you can neatly pick your pieces, great. But salmon filet and udon noodles - no.
Eight was a kind of ice dessert - it was fine and really none of the tasting menus really get dessert right.
So was it worth $125, no, unfortunately it wasn't. Four of the courses were good and on par, we can forgive the dessert, but three of them didn't really meet expectations.
However, if you ordered $125 worth of stuff you liked off the main menu, I can see how this would be a nicer meal. We were hoping for a course with the wagyu, but maybe that's too much to ask at this price point.
The seasoning overall was more overt and forward. Not overseasoned, but you tasted the seasoning more than the main component of the dish. Kind of the opposite approach of another more expensive omakase we tried where everything was very subtle and you could focus on appreciating the quality of the ingredients.
The place is casual, not fancy, and decorated like a fairly casual walk in place. The service was excellent and very polite.
So giving this 3 stars due to some of the questionable courses, rather strange communal plating choices, and it not really being worth the price.
But I do believe this is actually very likely a four star restaurant that we just misaligned on for some things - that makes it hard to just assign 4 stars when your specific experience wasn't that level.
But all that being said, I'd come back and order off the main menu and I expect that I'd probably enjoy everything I ordered myself. read more