Kuro Sakura Japanese BBQ Yakiniku 焼肉黒桜 — Restaurant in Sydney

This is my third time being here. I enjoyed my first two times there and don't mind travelling from kellyville where I live to eat here. On this occasion, I brought my mum here for her birthday. Booking experience was great, asked for a nice table due to occasion and was given a nice table so was happy with that.

Upon seating however, I was told there was no sashimi if i wanted to add sashimi, scallops and king prawn for 17 dollars per person. Given that sashimi is almost a staple for similar offerings in other restaurants i was disappointed, more so because i travelled 50 minutes to get here to be told instead of warned somehow beforehand... however I was not turned off the experience. Given that it was my mums bday however we wanted the extra options and I opted to pay the extra 17 dollars per head. When asked about whether any sort of compensation/discount could be given since we were missing out on sashimi, the waitress having asked her manager declined and said nothing could be provided. I believe this is pretty poor considering the circumstances.

In the end, we asked whether we could have corkage waived for a bottle of wine we brought which was acceptable to them... However, we were still disappointed in the sashimi scenario.

To add to this, something has changed from the past times i visited. Meat quality wasn't great. Lotus root chips were stale.

Sorry to say I will not be recommending the restaurant given the circumstances.

This part is in response to the reply by the restaurant. I'd correct you in saying that I had to come up with a proactive solution myself to compensate for having the sashimi missing. You did not offer us the compensation yourself, i had to ask with a back and forth between the waitress and management which is where the issue lies. Sure you waived $20 (not $30 you specified as we are a table of 4) for corkage but the issue is I had to suggest it as you did not offer any compensation for the a whole item missing from the menu. The issue is not the compensation, it's the fact we booked a table early during the day and were notified when we arrived at 7:00pm. This means that even if we decided not to dine with you, we would have to look for somewhere else to eat without proper planning. We do not live close to chatswood and travelled just to eat at your restaurant. It took us an hour to get there after a day of work and it was another work day the next day. We had little choice but to accept or else i ruin my mum's birthday. Why was I not notified about the sashimi when I booked earlier in the day as I booked on the same day? Surely you were aware of that information at the time I booked which I believe was during lunch time. I think that information is quite important to pass on.

I'd recommend if this happens to other customers, you proactively offer some sort of compensation, no matter how small for the inconvenience. It's the gesture that counts, not the compensation itself. If I was offered, there's a good chance I would not have accepted. It's basic customer service... And when a customer spends the time to review (which I never do) you take it on the chin and accept the feedback. Please do not try to blame the customer, I think i'm quite reasonable in my concern. Clearly judging by the reviews here, my complaints are all valid and clearly show a pattern of issues around food quality, extremely poor customer service and a lack of...

Also adding onto Stephanie’s review Absolute rubbish customer service by the waitress. My friends and I had a table booked for 5:30, however my friends were running 30 minutes late. The waitress did explain to us that each booking had a 1.5 hour time limit when we first sat down. However, after hearing that our friends would be 30 minutes late we asked the waitress if we would be able to reset the timer once they get here, which she replied yes. Under the impression that we could reset the timer once our friends got here, we waited for another 20 minutes until the waitress came back and told us we only had 30 minutes to order. Obviously we weren’t happy about that seeing as she agreed to reset the timer once our friends got here. When we questioned why she had said that we could reset the timer she said she meant that we would be able to change menus when our friends came.

If you are going to be concerned about our people of our ‘background’ (I’m Chinese) being typical for not showing up maybe you should also be concerned about your background and hire someone that can actually understand English? If you don’t understand a question don’t just answer and say yes when later down the line you’re going to backtrack and deny. Don’t keep telling us that you explained to us that the booking is only for 1.5 hours, I completely understand that. What I don’t understand is why we were told that we could ‘reset the timer’ when our friends came (essentially extending the booking) but then 20 minutes later you telling us that we couldn’t? If you had told us no when we asked the first time there would be no problems and I wouldn’t be writing this review. Your explanation that you kept repeating was that ‘you told us earlier that we had 1.5 hours’ clearly showed to me that either you don’t have a good enough grasp of the English language to be running the business or you clearly weren’t listening at all to what we were saying.

If you are going to say that it is ‘100% your fault’ maybe you should re-evaluate the situation and think hard about what question we asked you and how you responded to it. If you think that it is completely my fault does that mean you played no role in the misunderstanding of that question and saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’. I don’t for the love of me see how that would be my fault too? Maybe you could enlighten me? To be honest I also don’t see the connection between our issue and people of my ‘certain background’ not showing up? I think we all know what this type of behaviour is and I don’t need to explain it. It is quite blatant.

Absolute rubbish service by the waitress. I would not recommend this restaurant to anyone despite having come here multiple...

I don't normally write bad reviews but when I choose to, it must be a terrible experience. This place really needs a thorough training on communication and customer service. First of all, once you made a booking on their website, they chased after you with many repetitive emails and SMS asking you to pay a deposit as if it was such a popular place on a weekday night and you had to beg for a table. (but that's not true!) I made a note that we have a pram however they still gave us a table upstairs. My partner said "look we have a pram" and the receptionist looked at us with a blank face and just said yes that's your table. So we had to lift our heavy pram by ourselves. What we didn't know was that's just a shocking start. We asked about the difference between the deluxe and the value menu and the waitress pointed at the differences on the menus and said she had to confirm if we could order Deluxe. So when she came back with a yes we assumed they had everything they needed for a Deluxe menu so we ordered Deluxe because it has chicken nuggets which is my 4 Year old girl's favorite. Guess what? They don't actually had chicken nuggets for the night and what made it even worse was that they didn't tell us until we asked about it after having waited for 30 minutes and told us they had actually given us a double sized plate of chicken wings because they didn't have chicken nuggets! OMG, do you actually have idea what a nightmare it could be when you promised something to a 4 year old and made her really happy but ended up not being able to deliver it? And why did you not ask if we'd like another size of chicken wings? Remember this is a place that would charge you for food waste! And there's no customer service whatsoever. Nobody even told us how to adjust the flame and we had to figure it out by ourselves halfway through. Anyway, poor service aside, the biggest letdown is still the food. I have been to many Yakiniku places in Crows Nest and North Sydney etc and trust me, the quality of the meat here is not worth the same money you pay for in those other places.(Seriously, you call that rib finger?!) So, if you want to spend $100 per head and have a truly high quality Japanese BBQ experience, I highly recommend you going to somewhere else! 1 star to the 1 staff who volunteered to help us lift the pram to downstairs (who seemed to be a kitchen staff, not even from the...