Bob N.
Yelp
Fast food flavors, meet fine dining prices. Long story short: the prices are at least 2x-3x what they should be for the version of this food done well. Unfortunately, it is done consistently poorly. Everything Tysons Group does in all its properties telegraphs to its guests "We are out to skin you for everything you're worth." And that niggardly* spirit permeates the attitude of anti-hospitality at all their restaurants.
*a word of Scandinavian origin used in honor of our Swedish dining companions and unrelated to the racial slur.
To say this restaurant is expensive (and it is) obscures the more salient fact that the quality and the prices are wildly disproportionate. This isn't the type of expensive restaurant where you're getting top notch produce and cutting edge technique for your money. I paid ¥2600 for a fried chicken sandwich that I promise you was actually worse than what I get in fast food restaurants--and I don't mean any particular specialist like Chick-fil-a, I mean all of them. For one thing, they managed to burn the chicken. That's kind of remarkable because I can't recall a fast food restaurant having ever burned my fried chicken. I even worked in a chicken restaurant as a teenager and I can report from personal experience it isn't easy to do. But when you do it, you know full-well it is burnt, so serving burnt chicken is absolutely inexcusable. That is nothing but a lazy and hostile kitchen.
The crab cake is a dense, Old Bay-flavored pellet with an inside so processed it lost any resemblance to crab meat and instead is bizarrely grainy, which you can see in the photo. I suspect they used grits or polenta in place of breadcrumbs. (¥1800 for two slightly-larger-than-500-yen size cakes). In density, it kind of resembled the shrimp sausage you might get in a Thai restaurant or those processed Japanese fish sausage. This is the exact opposite of what a crab cake should be. They should be light and barely bound with all of the lump crab on display. The Cajun-style "remoulade" just seemed like off-the-shelf mayonnaise with a generic Cajun spice mixed through. There was no Creole mustard or cornichons or anything else to add any dimension. And it was served not as a generous dipping sauce but like a thin glaze on the plate.
My wife's grilled snapper with "smoky" tomato and cucumber relish (¥3200) was sad, bland, and over-cooked. One of our dining companions is a pescetarian but she decided to go with the full vegetarian Buddha bowl (quinoa, spinach, shaved beets, spicy cashew nuts, avocado, tomato, cucumber and tofu with tahini lemon dressing ¥1,800) which she reported as a disappointing and boring salad, albeit served in a large bowl. Our other dining companion got the wagyu burger, a truly ridiculous ¥3400. After eating it, he reported he would expect to be charged ¥1300 (not what is was worth, mind you).
A lot of people remark that you are paying for ambience or the view when coming here. If so, we payed for a view of a cinder block wall. Our friends were enjoying a beer on the deck when we arrived, so there's that but don't expect a view from indoors. To add injury to insult, the roof began leaking on me in the middle of the meal. The staff were aware of this apparently long-standing problem and said that they weren't expecting the rain so soon. But, they said, they had left the table next to it open so we could move there. Now, I imagine you must be asking yourself the same question I asked myself: Why didn't you seat us there to begin with? And more to the point, why don't you fix your roof?
Service is also a very mixed bag. Our friends who arrived earlier reported a rather unpleasant server with a sour attitude on the deck. This surprised all of us since one thing Japan does well in customer service is putting on a friendly mask or at least an efficient, if sometimes officious, attitude. Our server indoors was OK though his English wasn't so good. So for any extended explanations, e.g., about things like the leaking roof, he resorted to Japanese. Our friends are Swedish and don't speak Japanese so we were left to translate. At one point, despite three steps of confirmation, we were delivered the wrong dessert. We had to ask for water and it arrived without ice. Perhaps the European half of our table preferred them that way; I don't, especially not when the temperature is still hitting 30C. On the other hand, the staff did call taxis for us and walk us out. Apparently this is quite common as there was an armada of taxis waiting in the dead end at the harbor when we left.
The high points of the meal were the beers and the desserts. The cheesecake, contrary to its claims of being the best in the world, was bog standard but the deconstructed-cannoli-like cassata (no sponge cake but pieces of sweetened pie crust(?)) with pistachios and cranberries was just the kind of thing I enjoy. Both a more reasonable ¥950. The stout is also quite nice; the IPA, fine; the Wheat, ok.
