Ginza Izakaya Parramatta — Restaurant in Sydney

Definitely an amazing place to come and eat. The food is top notch. The flavours are just wonderful. Portion sizes are very reasonable to the prices. Th prices in general are very fair. Today we ordered the kingfish, the tuna, the wagyu beef, the scallops, the salmon, and the large sushimi.

The Kingfish:

Beautiful cut of fish, marinated with chilli and lemon, just an amazing looking dish that is also very delicious. The only thing I would have liked is maybe some creme fresh or mayonnaise to just give it a little more creaminess and cut the high acidity. In saying this an amazing palate cleanser and opening dish to the meal.

The Tuna tartar:

Could not fault this dish, the tuna was just perfect and soft and had no sinew. The flavours were just on point and e erything worked well together. However very import that it's easten straight away as, if you leave it the flavours seem to become too intense and it doesn't taste nice.

The Salmon carpparccio.

So soft and delicious, visually appealing and tastes wonderful. The only thing g I didn't like about it was the lemon bits that were added while so visually appealing the flavour overtook the beautiful Salmon. Maybe use some finger lime pearls or even the lemon pearls themselves so it doesn't take over the flavour.

The Wagyu tartar

Omg the flavour was definitely my favourite! The taste of that fried riddiccio with he beef along with the sauce and the other things added was just to die for! My only criticism is the cut of meat used. The amount of Sinew that we had to spit out was huge considering there was hardly any meat. But even in saying that it was so yummy!

The Butter scallops.

I definitely thought this one would be the best and was the most awaited dish. It came out looking just Royal, but unfortunately the taste wasn't reciprocal of the look. It wasn't bad but I personally wouldn't order it again. The flavour balance was just not there, it's hard to say what didn't work, but over all it just wasn't what I thought it would be.

The sashimi platter.

Now this was just gorgeous! It came out like a bride ready for her wedding day, dry ice fog, with a lot of beautiful produce laid to rest on different things like pandas leaves, lettuce leaves, little bamboo beds, and grated reddish all sitting on a bed of ice. The produce was amazing. Salmon, snapper, octopus, kingfish, tuna, oysters, and scallops. After the platter came we were told that there is no prawns today. We weren't told if there was a substitution or more of something else etc. The freshness was amazing, the visual impact was also just amazing. The only letdown was that the scallops were presented with lemon wedges in between them, and unfortunately that took away from the beautiful sweetness of the natural sushi scallops and that actually cured the scallops.

Over all a great experience, beautiful food, good service and great atmosphere. Our server was Assa (hopefully...

My partner and I received a Groupon gift that was for a 9 dish degustation at this restaurant so we took opportunity to try this place out. We made a booking prior to coming.

There were some issues that brought to my attention on arrival and during our dinner that I wanted to mention:

Upon arrival, the restaurant was FULLY packed. Considering the COVID pandemic and the regulations for restaurants, it was concerning that the tables were not arranged 1.5m distance from each other and diners were not social distancing. Mind you, the restaurant is TINY. There were about maybe 20+ diners in one small space.

There was no one recording diner’s phone numbers or had the “scan the code on your phone and fill in details to check in” feature like majority of places do (as part of the COVID regulations).

No hand sanitiser stand at entrance of restaurant. (Luckily I always bring my own bottle).

Once we were seated, one of the waitresses came over to scan the Groupon code off my phone. I placed my phone on the table and zoomed in on the code and showed it to her. She recorded the code on her device. I don’t understand why after recording the code, she proceeded to touch my phone to return the phone to me? With this pandemic, why would you touch someone else’s belongings with your bare hands? I don’t know if this person has the virus or what they touched prior to coming to our table. I was more than happy to get my phone myself once they were finished getting the code - (( LOL I’m a nurse so please forgive me if this sounds ridiculous. Not a fan of germs and this pandemic has made me more of a germaphobe )).

Staff were not wearing masks or gloves (even in the kitchen). I would understand it wouldn’t be necessary for them but what about the safety of their diners?

There were bugs crawling on our table during our meal

Bathroom wasn’t great - it was the type where it was shared with other businesses and there was NO SOAP according to my partner.

There was a couple sitting next to us and one of them ordered a drink. She notified one of the waitresses that her straw/drink had sauce in it or it appeared dirty - if you’re working at a restaurant, isn’t it your responsibility to check that everything is clean BEFORE giving it to the diner ???

Overall, food ? Average. Not great. Some foods were frozen and not fresh. Staff were lovely but ..with everything that I noticed during our dinner, my partner and I are definitely not coming back.

They should really be following other restaurants/cafes with a COVID business action plan and grabbing details of their patrons in case a diner has been suspected of...

Went here for the first time with 3 friends on a Friday night and was really not very impressed by... anything, really. Except for the wait staff apologising for how long the food was taking, which they eventually grew tired of doing after the 3rd late dish. Having said that, food was arriving with a gap of at least 20-30 minutes between each dish (not great). The quality of the food was really nothing to write home about either. The chicken karaage was really more like Korean fried chicken, which isn't necessarily bad but the picture on the menu didn't match what we got at all. One of the sushi my friend ordered had capsicum in it, which we thought was a little strange for sushi. The tuna in the spicy tuna taco we got didn't seem fresh. I held it up my nose about to take a bite but I just couldn't because it didn't smell fresh. I wouldn't be surprised if these tuna tacos had been sitting on the shelf for a long time and the wait staff had just forgotten to hand it to us. One of the friends I was with works in hospitality and he thought that they should have aimed to serve all the food around the same time, cooking the food that took the longest first and start cooking the other food at the time the first dish would predictably finish. I don't think this is what happened at all because it seemed that they tried spacing out the way that our food was served so we didn't have to wait 1.5hrs for all of our food to arrive. The restaurant was quite packed when we first got in so at first we didn't expect to get our food so quickly and we were quite patient. But as the restaurant started to empty out, we noticed that the wait staff wasn't even cleaning the empty tables and appeared absolutely swamped with orders from us and some tables who were there even before us! It was ridiculous. We asked for table water and didn't even get it until much later on after asking again. Maybe we just caught this restaurant on a really bad day, but this experience is enough to make me not want to go back EVER. Quite frankly, it's given me a bit of PTSD when it comes to trying new Japanese restaurants, fearing the food + service may be just as bad...