Okami Japanese Restaurant — Restaurant in Sydney

This All You Can Eat restaurant operates under a scam model. It should be called "All You Can Be Patient" or "All You Can Wait For." We never received 80% of the dishes we ordered, including main items like sushi and sashimi, as well as inexpensive items like wasabi, ginger, and miso soup.

Our reservation was at 8pm, but we weren't seated until 8:10pm, understood we needed to wait for food so we ordered immediate so the sooner we ordered, the sooner we got our foo. Our first dish, a squid salad stated on the menu suitable for four people, didn't arrive until 8:30pm, and the portion was so small, only enough for one person. The salad was drowning in sauce, clearly pre-made in a large batch, and excessively salty. Between 8:30 pm and 9 pm, a few small dishes trickled in: edamame (a tiny portion), four prawns, and two miso soups. No main dishes appeared at all.

Frustrated and thinking our orders hadn't gone through, we reordered multiple items like sashimi, sushi, more miso soup, and prawns, but nothing came. We repeatedly asked the waitstaff to check on our food, and they kept assuring us it was on the way. By 9:10pm, we asked the staff again, only to be told the kitchen had no dockets for our orders. Yet, small dishes had come out sporadically, indicating the kitchen had received some orders. The main dishes were ordered together with the entree dishes, it did not make sense if the entree orders came through without the main.

My husband went to the pass (where the food came out from the kitchen) to check, where he found many dockets lying around, ignored by the staff, who seemed too tired or lazy to do their job. He pointed out our dockets with our table number, but the staff just stared blankly, possibly due to a language barrier or again, don’t get paid enough to care. After speaking to multiple staff members, we finally got our food at 9:30pm. Noting the kitchen is closed at 9:30pm and the restaurant is closer at 10pm. We got in at 8:10pm to just get our main dishes at 9:30pm.

The numerous dockets laying around at the pass and the timely arrival of our drinks indicated that our orders had gone through, but the kitchen simply hadn't prepared the food. When we paid, our bill was so long due to duplicated orders that never arrived. This is a disgusting scam. We didn't receive enough food for one person, let alone two. It was 100% NOT All You Can Eat. Don’t fall for this scam.

In addition, despite eating so little, I got the trots on the way home.

If you want a proper dinner, spend your money elsewhere. Marrickville has many better restaurants. Avoid this place where you'll end up begging for the food...

TL; DR: All you can eat menu is cheap but terrible. Poor quality ingredients, lacking in flavour, badly prepared. Overcharged for drinks. Untidy toilets.

The reviews and write ups for this place are extremely misleading (and potentially fake or paid). We were expecting a cheap and cheerful local Japanese restaurant. We adjusted our expectations for the price point and the all you can eat format but did not expect the food to be as terrible as it was.

The sushi was very amateurish - tiny little flavourless bites on top of mushy rice. The quality I would expect to find in the “sushi” section of a cheap RSL buffet or free airport lounge buffet. Honestly, you will get better sushi at Woolies Metro.

Most dishes we tried followed the same format - flavourless and badly prepared. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of the menu was frozen and reheated or cooked for service. Gyoza tasted like frozen supermarket gyoza with prawn flavour rather than actual prawn. Beef “carpaccio” was just soggy slices of rare beef; cooked prawns again soggy, wet and flavourless - both probably just thawed from a freezer. Miso steak wasn’t grilled properly - it was more like stewed cubes of steak and miso/any flavour was absent. Fried dishes like tempura, chicken karaage and takoyaki weren’t great - a stick of fried batter with a sliver of prawn inside does not make tempura. The only dishes that were just ok were the chicken teriyaki skewers and the miso eggplant but those are quite basic dishes. To call any of this food Japanese is an insult to the cuisine and culture.

All you can eat is just under $35 per person and total bill came to $160 for 4 of us. This included being charged $10 for each jug of soda water which was mostly ice and probably came from a postmix fountain at a few cents a serve. $160 can go a long way at any local neighbourhood restaurant in the inner west in terms of quality and quantity - this is not one of those places.

No comment on the decor or service given the cheap eats price range but the toilets were quite untidy. The waste baskets overflowed with paper towel spilling onto the floor so clearly no regular cleaning done - definitely not COVID-safe in...

The place were jam packed with people during dinner, which meant noise and heat. The air conditioning couldn't catch up with the amount of people.

The foods are terrible. I could hand pick the one which are okay, such as Chicken Karaage (the batter is light and crispy), Beef Carpaccio (nice beef and ponzu with salad combination), and wakame salad (taste simply amazing). The rest is just AYCE trap.

Sushi (nigiri and roll) is jam packed with rice without any concern of filling whatsoever. It feels like, "Hey, you order it so you must finish it or we will charge you, even though it's just mostly rice and taste bad!" And you can't order sashimi without having all the terrible nigiri and roll. The tamagoyaki simply terrible, huge chance not made in house. Ebi still got veins and taste bland. Tuna feels frozen and watery. And all the roll basically just cucumber filling.

This pattern continues to other dishes, such as curry udon with lots of udon and a couple piece of katsu. Huge portion of fried rice. Bland Miso Soup. Overcooked beef yakiniku. The steak actually okay. The spicy ika is simply squid imitation cake, not a real squid. The tempura batter is dense and the sauce is bland. Takoyaki mostly just batter. The croquette is nice, but just potato without anything added. The agedashi tofu surprisingly okay with soft silken tofu.

The dessert was just okay. The sesame ice cream feels heavy and a bit rancid. The taiyaki feels like frozen product with adzuki filling and fried, nothing special.

The service is slow. Your order may come 10 minutes after you order it. And when you were hungry with empty table you got tendency to order more than what you need.

Overall, even though it's understandable it's an AYCE business which aiming to get as much profit as possible with as low as possible food cost, it simply feels terrible. There is no love for the food, especially the sushi. Yes, it is filling, but not satisfying. You can have your money worth better elsewhere, but not here. But, surprisingly all other people seems happy to dine here, maybe my standard is...