| rev:text
| - Yikes! Reading the other reviews here, I'm wondering if everyone else went to the same restaurant I did! Unfortunately, I have to go strongly against the grain: Sen of Japan was an incredibly poor experience.
There were early warning signs. First off, our waiter couldn't even pronounce the Japanese fish names correctly. Then, on the menu, kanpachi was listed as "baby king mackerel" (see picture). These should have been big red flags that Sen of Japan isn't a passable sushi joint; nevertheless, we continued on. Let's just say we gave them a few mulligans.
Those mulligans were proven undeserved when our orders of the otoro sushi were a disaster. When we picked up the sushi with our chopsticks, the rice literally fell apart. Not a single person in my party - and we're all very experienced sushi eaters and chopstick users - was able to pick up the otoro and eat it before it disintegrated. Want a picture of the most epic fail (that barely made it two inches above the plate before crashing and burning)? See attached. Ya, I'm not exaggerating. Seeing otoro like that brings a tear to my eye.
Worse yet, the chef loves drenching everything in sauce with totally overpowering flavors (the waiter touted the nigiri with sauce as the chef "specialty"). I just don't understand it. Nigiri is something that should implicitly taste good. It's not something that anyone should need to cover up with other flavors in order to be edible. When a chef puts toppings/sauce on nigiri, the goal should be to complement the existing flavor or possibly even evoke a new perspective or understanding of the central ingredient - not completely overwhelm it.
Unfortunately, at Sen of Japan, overwhelm the fish is exactly what the chef does. I could barely make out the salmon underneath all that heavy citrus fruit flavor from the orange miso sauce. It was horrifying. And the sauces aren't even tailor made for specific nigiri. The waiter offered either an orange miso or a spicy sauce with the salmon, and told us we could get those sauces on other sushi too. I honestly felt like we should have been at McDonald's dunking our nigiri like Chicken McNuggets in those sauce packs.
The chef takes the same approach to the sumibiyaki. No matter what we ordered - and we got the chicken, shrimp, squid, and scallop - the skewer is absolutely drenched in sauce. Very disappointing.
Service was also quite poor. Refills on tea and water were far and few in between. Waiter disappeared for a long time with our credit card when we were trying to pay. Also, a waitress got a huge attitude when another party member asked her where they source their duck meat, responding sarcastically "I don't know, is there somewhere it should be from?" We were all taken aback, and have no idea why that was an offensive question to her. (Speaking of the duck tataki, I'd recommend skipping it; it tasted more like hickory-smoked BBQ pork than duck.) Finally, they also charged us for fresh wasabi. It's not even in the point-of-sale system, as evidenced on our bill - they just tacked it on as an additional charge. C'mon, I think we ordered enough food that you don't need to nickel and dime us.
All in all, Sen of Japan fails because it is neither a passable Japanese restaurant nor a passable fusion restaurant, and the service is bad to boot. The dishes we tried had at best a vaguely Japanese vibe, and even the chef's 'specialty' item - nigiri drenched in overpowering sauce - is utterly lacking in execution.
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