Tim M.
Yelp
We finally landed here after looking for a place to eat dinner. Every other place we stopped at was only doing to-go due to the whole COVID thing, so this was probably choice #3 or #4 on our quest to get food. I wanted sushi, and they did have that.
We stepped inside to find that we were standing on a decent sized pile of leaves, dirt and napkins. My first thought was "maybe clean the entryway once in a while". We were seated rather promptly, but that would be the last prompt thing of the evening, pretty much everything went downhill from there.
Like I said, I wanted sushi, and my favorite sushi place is a little on the higher end price-wise so I was looking for something maybe not so expensive. The wok option would be good for the wife since she doesn't eat sushi, so when we found the "daily special" with a choice of sweet & sour chicken she was set. I settled on a couple sushi rolls, a Spicy Rainbow roll and the Kiss of Fire roll. We each ordered tea, me a cold tea, the wife a hot tea. Let's start with the tea, shall we. Holy cow this was probably the most bitter tea I've ever drank in my life. The wife's hot tea was equally bitter, which means these both came from the same brew, one just poured over ice to make it "not hot", yet even watering it down with melted ice couldn't stop the bitter taste. It was rough, to say the least. They clearly had a lot of "to-go" orders because there was a non-stop flow of people coming in, going straight to the counter and getting food and leaving. The problem was that the to-go line started backing up and nobody was "social distancing", they were all just crowding around the counter asking where their food was, getting very pushy. This led the staff to cater to the to-go orders first, while we sat there waiting for a very long time for our food. Then it happened, my two sushi rolls landed on the table and my wife's dinner was nowhere to be found. There's one thing that really irritates me in a restaurant, and that's when part of a table gets served and the other part of the table doesn't. So now I had my food, but my wife sat there with nothing. I was waiting on her food for about another 10-15 minutes before a waitress came by and asked if everything was okay (since I had not eaten my sushi yet). We asked if my wife's food was coming soon, or maybe they could provide some sort of time frame and she just looked at us confused. We reminded her that we ordered the daily special with sweet & sour chicken, to which she assured us it would be right up. We then heard her go over to the counter and call back to the kitchen "1 daily special, sweet & sour...." Wait, what? You just now put that order in? So, I ate my sushi while my wife waited for her food.
I'll say this, all in all the sushi was good. The Spicy Rainbow roll was on the bland side of spicy, it could have used a bit more heat. The kiss of Fire roll was very good, I would certainly order that roll again, you know, if I had an hour to wait. The California roll that came with my wife's dinner (which we both knew was for me) was a bit bland, just lacking in flavor or freshness or something. On the good side, my wife's sweet & sour chicken was actually pretty good.
So my final thoughts here are, I know we're in the middle of a crazy time right now, and restaurants are struggling. But I have visited plenty of restaurants who have managed to balance the to-go orders and still cater to those who are dining in person. In my mind, the person sitting in your dining room is at the very least equally important, if not even more important, than the to-go order. Also, right next door there's a pizza joint that has absolutely figured out how to handle the to-go situation without clogging up the dining room. Maybe just walk next door, sit there and watch for a bit, and then go back to your establishment and think about what you are doing and how to do it better. I'm sticking this one with a 2 star because the food took far too long to reach us, the dining room could have used cleaning so we weren't stepping in the door onto a dirty floor (especially in a time of clean being the most important thing) and the order coming out at totally different times. At the end of the day, I could have just went to my favorite sushi place and it probably would have only cost a little bit more, but the freshness, service and cleanliness would have been miles ahead.
