Shuraku

Came here on a special day and I Love this restaurant 🥰 Got their set menu and everything was delicious! The quality of the beef and the seafood was top-notch. Very fresh, and the meat was cooked to the right tenderness while allowing you to taste out the original flavor of the ingredients. I love the cute crab, and the grilled meat especially. The sale was served beautifully! The deserts were of the right sweetness. And the amount was good enough that it made both of us contended(I didn’t finish the noodles though). The service was prompt and caring. No complaints at all.

Great tasting menu. Calm and nice atmosphere. Food portion is not huge but felt contented, and every dish was very delicious. It’s a BYOB place so you can bring your own beverage!

Delicious dinner! This shop is very clean and makes you feel very comfortable. The meat of this shop is very tender. The most delicious dish is this one, Grilled Shrimp with Strips with Steak. Also Udon noodles are very delicious. If you love barbecue, this is definitely your paradise.

Extraordinary experience and dedicated, kind service. Joe is awesome and so expressive about the story that got him where he is, clearly loves food and sound technique in preparation yet serves it up in a casual, unfussy environment that welcomes even the youngest and clumsiest of patrons (props to the staff for helping us through a culinary mishap in which we dropped our tiny crab amid cheers and chopsticks). Would highly recommend to anyone looking for a personal, authentic, and high quality experience in Japanese cuisine.

One of the rare small plate restaurants where you can order blindly off the menu and have every dish be great to excellent. Three of us were pleasantly stuffed and paid slightly more than the tasting menu price for a single person. Staff provide careful and friendly service throughout the meal. Even the restroom is a cut above. Great bidet.

You can’t go wrong with anything on their menu but if you have the means to, I highly recommend trying the tasting menu. They use quality ingredients and let their natural flavors shine. Chef Joe and team are masters at their craft but are equally friendly and that makes the dinning experience very enjoyable.

I found Shuraku when I was looking for a spot for my boyfriend's birthday dinner. I knew we wanted something Japanese, but we always do omakase, so I wanted to do something different. That's when I found out about Shuraku's tasting menu - 8 courses @ $110/person. Pretty reasonably priced for a tasting menu. Halfway through, we really thought we would need to go grab a slice of pizza afterwards but we were actually really full after everything. Here is the menu for April 2019: First / Sakizuke - homemade tofu w/ dashi soy & fresh wasabi - simple and clean tasting. Nice way to open the meal. Second / Oshinogi - seared miyazaki beef sushi w/ uni - one of the best of the night. I always love beef/uni combos. It's rich, but not overly so, and I how the flavors go together. I also really enjoyed the small pile of pickled daikon Third / Zensai - grilled baby ayu (sweetfish) - I normally don't love grilled things because it's too charred/smoky, but they got this one right spring vegetable gelée in sakura leaf - was not a fan. I think it was the gelée that threw me off. It just didn't taste like it belonged there seared sakura masu (cherry trout) sashimi - perfectly seared and very tender. Reminded me of salmon Fourth / Yakitori - chicken oyster w/ lemon, magret duck & tokyo scallion w/ yuzu kosho, chicken filet w/ black shichimi - I honestly don't remember which is which but I really liked this course as well. It was up there with the beef sushi/uni Fifth / Hashiyasume - steamed spring turnip, garlic chives, bamboo shoot, & baby sardines in yuzu dashi broth - nothing too crazy. I think this was probably meant as a palette cleanser for the next course Sixth/ Grilled Entrée - carabineros prawn w/ lemon - this one is tied with the beef/uni for being the best of the night. It was perfect. If I closed my eyes, I could have sworn I was back in Barcelona eating those prawns (they did say they were from Spain). I also liked the little expanding hand towel they gave us right before this course hokkaido scallop w/ cherry tomato - plump and juicy, which are words I feel weird about using to describe food (or anything, for that matter), but there's really no other way to describe it washu beef culotte w/ cipollini onion - this was great - a perfect medium rare. But I wonder if it would have been worth it to add the $30 to get the miyazaki A5 instead Seventh / Noodle - Inaniwa udon w/ ikura & ume tororo - I didn't really care too much for this one. Maybe it was because I was expecting some warm, chewy noodles to close out the meal - but it was a cold noodle dish instead. Eighth / Dessert - homemade strawberry ice cream - BF loved this (probably because it's one of his favorite flavors), but to me, it was a little reminiscent of Breyer's For drinks, I had some kind of lemon cocktail, which was just okay. He had an old fashioned, which you can't really go wrong with. My only gripe - I had called about a week and a half in advance to request a seat at the chef's counter and also mentioned it was for a birthday, which they said they noted. We did get a seat at the counter, but they didn't do anything special for the birthday - which is fine, but then there's really no point of making a "special note". But again, NBD - just a first world problem. I really liked the simple and clean layout of the restaurant, which is in true Japanese fashion. They even had a bidet in the bathroom. The whole experience made me feel like I was in Japan again.

Excellent tasting menu and it is very rare for me to rate 5 stars - price not crazy but won’t call it cheap. I wish the ice cream had more of an eastern vibe (red bean, green tea) or that I had gotten another beef sashimi as dessert.