I came here for an early dinner with some friends on a Wednesday night. None of us had ever been before and we decided to try it out for a change from our usual sushi restaurants.
The restaurant is quite large. It is clean, spacious, modern, and dimly lit. They have both an AYCE menu (I believe around $19-20) as well as an a la carte option. We decided to order a la carte as we were a small group and not particularly hungry. The menu also has a number of unique rolls and dishes that you would not necessarily find at typical sushi bars. I ordered the following dishes:
1) Fushimi Salad ($3.5 - assorted seafood, cucumber, green onion, with homemade sauce) - the only seafood I found was bits if calamari, and it was only small pieces of tentacles, not the nice smooth pieces if the squid's body. Given that the menu said 'assorted seafood' I was also hoping for some shrimp or crabmeat, but alas, did not have any. The dressing had a bit of a kick to it, was rather salty, and there was just too much dressing - the cucumbers were drenched! I wouldn't order this dish again.
2) Shrimp Asparagus ($5 - cooked shrimp and asparagus with yuzu miso sauce) - this was four pieces of shrimp settled upon four spears of cooked asparagus. I would order this dish again and it was my favourite of the night.
3) Eggplant Roll ($4, 4 pieces - eggplant, lettuce, cucumber, with house sauce) - warning: the eggplant is tempura eggplant! I wish the menu had said this as I do not like tempura and would not have ordered this dish had I known. Nevertheless, I had one piece.
4) Cucumber Roll - because I did not like the eggplant roll, I decided to order a standard cucumber roll as it was a dish where I knew I would not be surprised with tempura again! It was a typical cucumber roll, although I found that there was too much rice (same with the eggplant roll).
My friends also enjoyed the dishes that they had ordered. The serving sizes are quite generous here and everything is presented artfully. A dish of wasabi and ginger was brought to the table before we had even ordered. I didn't particularly like this as it meant that these items were not freshly served, and these were communal dishes meant to be shared by everyone at the table.
I am struggling with what to say regarding the service. Our server was very sweet and brought water to the table immediately. Although green tea was complimentary, you had to ask for it, and it was served in typical coffee mugs, not the little green tea cups. There were definitely some language issues with our server as she was not able to explain what was in the fushimi salad and I had asked for the house sauce on my eggplant roll to come on the side, but when she brought it to the table, she explained that she had forgotten and asked if I wanted a new roll. It was hard to turn down the roll once it had already come to the table. In addition I was surprised that she didn't ask about the fact that I had only eaten one of the four pieces of the eggplant roll. It would have been appreciated if she had asked and realized that I did not like the dish and then removed it from the bill.
Although there were a few snags in my meal, this is a restaurant I would come back to in order to try some of their other dishes.
Some additional notes:
1) They don't accept American Express
2) The bathrooms are co-ed - it's a series of single stalls with shared sinks and the stalls' doors are made of frosted glass.