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| - Overall I had a great experience at Ematei. I came in for Friday dinner and thank goodness my party got reservation beforehand, because when I arrived at 6:30pm for our table there were already tons of people waiting at the door for a seat.
Environment:
The restaurant is located on St. Patrick street, which is a small street in between Queen and Dundas. It kinda felt like a small alleyway.
The restaurant itself is fairly large and has a nice Japanese vibe to it, with colourful paintings and decor on the wall. There are some private tatami rooms for large groups, and I'm fairly certain you have to call ahead to reserve these type of rooms. In the tatami room you're supposed to take off your shoes and sit on a cushion on the tatami covered floor.
We didn't get a tatami room for my group, but instead we got a large table outside for our group of 10. I think the table can actually fit a lot more people, possibly up to 15, as we didn't fill up the seats on the other end. Though my problem was that there was a random hollowed out space in the middle of the table that didn't seem to serve any purpose, which made the table wider than it should, thus making talking to the person on the other side more difficult.
Food:
My friends recommended the hot pot at Ematei, but since none of the people I went with wanted to share one, I ended up getting their Nabeyaki Udon, which I guess had similar ingredients of the hot pot. The soup was very flavourful and I really liked the udon. The bowl tasted very authentic, similar to the udon noodle bowl that I tasted in Japan. I liked how smooth and chewy the udon noodles were, which was significantly different than the stuff you get at the supermarket. Meats wise there were very much of it, even though there was a lot of variety, but I still got full from my meal since I'm a small person, but I don't think many people will feel completely full from just getting the Nabeyaki Udon.
I did not try any other dishes so I can't comment on those, but just seeing the stuff that my friends got it seems that the portions are quite small here, given that the price is slightly higher than other Japanese restaurants nearby on Dundas West and Queen West.
Service:
I find that most of the servers at Ematei were Japanese/had Japanese background during my visit. This isn't necessary a bad thing because the servers were very nice and very attentive to our requests. However, I did find that the language barrier made it difficult to communicate with them sometimes, as their English wasn't very good. It was difficult to understand what they were saying and they had difficulties understand us as well. I feel bad saying this, because they were genuinely nice people, but to me I'd just rather be getting average service from people that I can communicate with better :/
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