It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of all you can eat Japanese food. But recently, the owner of Watami (which I frequent) opened a new Japanese restaurant in Market Village, so I figured I should give it a try. Yamamoto actually replaced Mongolian Grill, and the large and spacious layout still seemed a little odd to me for a Japanese restaurant. For dinner, the price is $21.99 for Monday to Thursday, and $23.99 for Friday to Sunday (for adults). Seniors have a $2 discount, and children under 10 are charged $11.99 all seven days of the week.
What I liked about Yamamoto is that you can practically order anything by individual pieces, so when you ask for 1 order of shrimp tampura, they'll give you exactly 1 piece! Because of the small portions, we were able to try a lot of dishes between 3 people. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the sushi here. The hand rolls were well-executed and the salmon sashimi was particularly excellent.There were hits and misses with the grilled food. The sirloin steak cubes were overcooked, although I did enjoy the baked butter mushrooms very much. There wasn't a huge selection of sushi rolls, but the one we chose - tiger roll(spider roll with mango and avocado)- was pretty good. I was pretty pleased with the dessert selection, which features the likes of crème brûlée, mango parfait, tiramisu, green tea pudding and five different flavours of ice cream.
Being a new restaurant, the place still needs to work out some of its kinks in operations. For instance, a third of our first order never arrived (although the server that followed up with this error was very diligent about it). All in all, I thought that the food here was decent for AYCE standards, and there were certainly a lot of variety. That said, I still much prefer à la carte style.