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| - TLDR; Don't buy the hype, this place is pretty mediocre. It might be 4-stars by Pittsburgh standards but it would probably be 3 or 3.5 max in a bigger city with more competition for Asian food.
My boyfriend and I ordered the chicken heart, chicken thigh + green onion, bacon + quail egg, and whole squid robatayaki. We also got the takoyaki, nasu shigiyaki (Japanese eggplant with ground chicken and miso), Hokkaido scallop special, and the sponge cake dessert. I'll go through each of these one by one:
The chicken heart was mostly OK. The texture could have been better, but mainly it was just slathered with too much sauce, which is a criticism that applies to many of these dishes.
The chicken thigh and green onion skewer was just sad. The chicken wasn't as juicy as at other places where I've had this dish, but the worst part was the green onion. It was so sad, thin, dry, and tasteless! It's supposed to come from the lower, round parts of the onion so that it's more substantial and flavorful, but all the pieces of green onion were from the flat, flimsy part at the top. This one was also slathered with too much sauce to let the natural flavors shine through. I want to *taste* the green onion, but instead it was reduced to a paper-thin vessel for sauce.
The bacon and quail egg skewer was acceptable.
The squid was okay, but it was served to us at room temperature, which made it a lot less appealing.
The takoyaki was again just okay. It didn't have the same kind of contrast between a slightly crispy exterior and soft, moist interior that I've come to expect from good takoyaki (though I'm spoiled since I recently came back from a trip to Osaka). I will call it a fine introduction if you've never had takoyaki before.
The eggplant was definitely the highlight of the meal. The eggplant had a nice texture and the chicken was tasty, though the flavors were too strong and salty, which pushed it towards feeling more like Asian fusion than authentic food.
The Hokkaido scallop dish was nice too. It was just raw scallop presented with some garnish.
The sponge cake dessert was awful. The so-called "sponge cake" was dense and hard as a rock. I suspect they just bought frozen sponge cake and dumped it on a plate. But even beyond that, the flavors of this dish were incredibly incohesive. It's as if they just tossed as many vaguely Asian dessert-y elements together on a plate as they could without thinking about how to make them talk to each other.
I will say that the presentation of the dishes was quite pretty and that the restaurant has a pretty cool ambiance. Still, in the end you have to look past appearances and judge the taste of its food. It just isn't good enough. Don't buy the hype.
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