Hakone Sushi — Restaurant in Coquitlam

3.5 stars

We saw good reviews about this Japanese restaurant, so we decided to give it a try.

Korean people run this Japanese restaurant. Parking in this neighbourhood is alright. You can park in the parking lot of Coquitlam Centre and walk to the restaurant. The restaurant belongs to a complex that has commercial parking space, BUT it is very easy to miss it. If you can find the entrance of the commercial parking lot and do not miss it, you should be able to find free parking there. This Japanese restaurant is located inside the complex. Not right on The High Street.

The chef is an older Korean gentleman and two servers are older female. They were very polite to us. They took our order correctly. However, the chef was super busy taking care of the customers who ate in the restaurant and ones who ordered take out. The dishes came out very slowly.

We ordered two pieces of the salmon aburi sushi at $3.95. The rice was kind of mushy. The salmon should be seated a little bit but the quality was not there yet. The texture of the salmon meat was soft but not really seared. It definitely lost some marks here. I ordered one piece of ikura nigiri sushi. The ikura was sitting and touching the aburi salmon sushi. The sauce of the aburi salmon sushi laid on the seaweed of the ikura nigiri sushi. The sauce soaked the seaweed, plus that the oil of the ikura went all the way down to the rice and plate. It should not be like that. Again the rice of the ikura nigiri sushi was mushy. The rice should be firm and sticky or chewy.

The chopped scallop roll and house roll were great. The chopped scroll roll had a bite size. The house roll was bigger that came with some sauce on top. It was interesting though. Usually each dish of sushi comes with some ginger and wasabi. This dish had none but only the sushi itself. Usually there was some decorations on the plate with the wasabi and ginger.

The seared tuna sashimi was great outside. It was crispy with some salty flavour, but the tuna sashimi itself was still frozen, so the texture of the fish was very cold and not ready for eating!

This restaurant has some good dishes and bad ones. They can still be improved on a lot of things. Probably the size of the restaurant is small. It does not have enough storage. It has a lot of things that are exposed to the public/the seating area or for customers to see. Not organized enough.

Pricing was average comparing to others. Not super expensive. It is a little bit cheaper than the ones in Burnaby and Vancouver. If you don't have high expectations or if you only look for so-so Japanese food, this restaurant works...

My fiance and I recently moved here from the Fraser Valley, where we had slim pickings of decent sushi restaurants. We spent an afternoon wandering around and found this little place hidden inside the mall across from our building.

We've never been disappointed with the freshness or quality of sushi made here. We're the type of people who eat all the raw stuff too, so freshness is always a concern.

On top of that the service is fantastic. The lady at the front is always friendly, although she doesn't speak much English, she's always trying to make sure we have everything we need. She recognizes us now, so that's a tell-tale of how often we're in there.

We have definitely tried the other places around here, but we keep coming back to Hakone. If you're a sushi lover, I definitely recommend it.

(I haven't tried their Korean dishes, but they...

The food was okay but the practice is not morally correct. We bought one Korean chirashi done (menu price $15.95) and one kal guksu (menu price $12.5).

When we paid, I noticed the total charged was higher than expected. The waiter didn’t provide a detailed receipt until we asked and the detailed receipt has price $16.95 for Korean chirashi don and $13.95 for kal guksu. When we inquired, response was menu is not update for new pricing yet.

This is purely not acceptable. You could have told us the new prices when we ordered, or gave us a heads up that menu is not updated and expected $1 or $2 increase than the prices presented. There are a lot of ways to handle this but not telling customers and hoping they don’t identify it when paying, is not the morally correct way and I will...