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| - Went here this evening to celebrate Mother's Day for Mom. This is probably my 3rd time here, but my first time writing a review on Yelp. It is a convenient location, ample parking and the interior is clean. We were seated right away despite not having any reservation which I was surprised about given it was the Saturday before Mother's Day. The decor is Japanese / Asian-inspired as you can imagine and tastefully done.
We started with their Stayce Roll which is a fairly good-sized roll. The interior of the roll has mango, avocado & sake (salmon). On top of the roll is a slab of smoked salmon. This was my first time trying this roll and it was nothing short of delicious! The raw salmon inside of the roll was fresh, the smoked salmon on top of the roll was awesome and the mango really added a level of depth that I'm not sure I've ever eaten with sushi.
Definitely one of my new favorite sushi rolls. Their Tuna Amazing roll is another one of my favorites which I've had here before. I've not yet had the opportunity to try many sushi spots in Arizona thus far, but Kawaii does sushi very well, in my opinion.
Here's where things are a bit different at Kawaii. You've just eaten sushi, right? But when you flip through the menu - you won't find many other Japanese inspired dishes (tempura, bento boxes, gyudon, etc, etc). In fact, the bulk of their entrees are Americanized-Chinese dishes (orange chicken, sesame chicken, beef broccoli, general tso's, etc, etc.) I think the only other Japanese inspired entree I spotted on the menu was the udon bowl. For some reason, that just seems strange to me, but it seems to work for them. i.e., if I wanted Chinese food, I wouldn't go to a sushi joint. If I wanted sushi, I wouldn't go Panda Express. Again, it's not necessarily a bad thing - it's just different for a sushi spot.
For an entree, I got the Hong Kong Pan Fried Noodles (House Special). Not as good as the sushi, but it was a fairly good portion of food and everything was fresh and hot. It was a little pricey (almost $15) for a fairly simple Chinese dish. Their House Special noodle dish consists of chicken, BBQ pork & shrimp. Of course, I only got 2-3 shrimp and the rest of the dish is fairly saturated with a lot of broccoli, a lot of water chestnuts, an overabundance of carrots and the noodles. Scattered in between the vegetables and noodles were a few pieces of pork and some chicken. There wasn't a lot of gravy in the dish which you would normally utilize to pour over your pan-fried noodles to soften them up. I'm Asian and this is how my Mom always made it. As a result of this, my dish remained fairly crunchy because of the lack of gravy and the fact that I don't like my dinner entrees to be described as crunchy. I will have to try something else next time I go. Don't get me wrong. It certainly wasn't horrible. In fact, I ate the whole thing. I would just opt to get something different next time.
In the meantime, I think Kawaii is a great spot for sushi! They appear to have a solid social media following on Yelp & Facebook. The employees are friendly and the atmosphere is chill & laid back without being terribly loud or overbearing.
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