| rev:text
| - I'm sad to report, I'm dropping 2 stars off of this restaurants review. I wanted to only drop 1 off, but my wife insisted I drop 2. And here's why:
This place has always had decent sushi. Like many places it can be hit or miss, and here they're mostly hits, so I'm not writing to complain about that. The quality of sushi is about the same as it's always been, and that is to say hard to beat for the happy hour price, and prepared consistently. Except for one thing, the portions seem to have shrunk as of about 1 month ago. It used to be that you couldn't fit a single slice of an arizona roll in your mouth in one bite, but now they seem to be making the base slice as large as a typical crunch roll and subsequently there's less topping as well. It tastes the same, but it's not the same value/slice seeing as how the price is the same.
The size of sushi changing doesn't bother me that much to be honest, I get it, it's a business and cutting down on costs is important, whatever, that's fine. Our real problem has become the service. On our latest trip there we took two friends with us. We showed up at 7:15 and ordered our food. It took a while to arrive, but not unreasonably long considering the amount of food we ordered, and drink service was decent for about the first 45 minutes. After we were done eating however, we didn't see a waiter for probably 20 minutes at all. At this point all of the plates were clean and we were wanting our check so we could book it home. There was a problem though, there literally wasn't a single employee out on the floor, we couldn't have waved one down if we wanted to. Once they finally made their appearance we managed to wave them down and get our check. Here's the part that annoyed us the most: We were gladly given the check, and we immediately put our credit cards in the checks and put the checks at the end of the table. From that point, it was easily another 25 minutes before they actually ran the tickets and brought back the receipts. During this time not a single dish was cleared from our table, it was a mess. All in all, by the time we got out of there it had been and hour and a half. And the restaurant wasn't even busy. Maybe 15 people total.
I've been eating here probably once every week or two for the last 2 years and the service has never really been stellar. Sometimes the service was quick, and the waitresses were attentive, however, more often than not, that isn't the case. It's very inconsistent.
Like another reviewer said, they keep changing staff, and after a brief discussion with one of the waitresses, my wife and I learned why. During one of our visits my wife sat down and mentioned to the waitress "I'm glad you're here because that other gave us slow service last time and we didn't tip her well." The waitress replied with "Oh, well she gave you slow service because we don't get to keep tips so she probably just doesn't care." We asked her who gets to keep the tips and she said "the lady in the yellow shirt", who I can only guess is the owners wife. Yeah, you heard that right, they pay their wait staff around minimum wage and all the tips go to, you guessed it, the pockets of the owners. Normally, I wouldn't have a problem with this if you are paying your wait staff a decent enough wage to give a crap about their job, but apparently that's not the case here. It's clear to me now that the reason the wait staff don't care about the service is because they have no incentive too.
I'm assuming this is what's going through the mind of the wait staff "You need a refill and it's been ten minutes since you went dry? Your plates are piling up and starting to glaze over after you've been done eating for half an hour and we haven't cleared them yet? You ask for your check and I don't pick it up for another 20 minutes to ring it through? I don't care, I don't get tips anyway so don't leave one"
It's my understanding that in the japenese culture wait staff are not tipped, and are not expected to be tipped. Which is fine, when, you're, in, japan. But the culture here is such that if the wait staff aren't getting their tips, it will show in the service they provide, and it's my humble suggestion that this restaraunt figures out a way to make it worth your wait staffs while to actually try harder. If the wait staff are incentivized properly and actually have a stake in customers returning to eat there again, the business will profit from it. If the wait staff stays like they currently are, customers will continue to be driven away and business will be lost. I hate saying it, but my two friends that I came with said "Kyle, I don't know why you took us here, but we're not coming here again", which makes me very sad. I live close, so I will still return, but two potential customers were last that night, just think about how many more you'll keep losing if things don't change?
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