Yamato — Restaurant in Kelowna

OMG. My husband and I used to frequent this place pre-Covid and decided to venture out on Sunday for our first time there since the lock down. You always expect to wait for a table for dim sum and today was no exception. After about a half hour wait, we were seated at the table closest to the door. Certainly not the best seat in the house as you freeze when the door opens. Why they don’t put a divider there for the comfort of their diners is a mystery to me. Just don’t care I guess. Once we were seated, we waited at least another half hour before anyone even came to the table to offer a pot of tea or to take our order. The server said they forget to walk down that aisle the restaurant. Whaaatt? They are always short staffed and the place is always busy. I guess they don’t want to pay an extra $15 an hour (less?) to have an additional server to keep customers happy. Finally our order came, minus 2 dishes that they said they were sold out of! Great. The sticky rice was smaller than what we remembered and cold. Want to get a server’s attention for some condiments? Good luck with that. An absolutely terrible experience and a first for us with this restaurant. I’d give zero stars except that the food is normally good here. An off day? I’m thinking not. We won’t be venturing back...

Yamato is a Japanese restaurant and it is the only place in Kelowna to get dim sum. The serve it Saturday & Sunday from 10am-2pm. Kelowna is a small city so I wasn't expecting a lot especially from a Japanese restaurant that only sold dim sum on such a small time frame on the weekends. However, it was undoubtedly the worst dim sum I have had in my entire life. It is not an exaggeration to say I would rather not eat then continue eating the food that we had ordered there. I came in with extremely low expectations but even those were far too high. The majority of dishes we ordered came within 30 seconds of the server leaving our table. As if everything had been already made and just set aside on a warming tray until they were ordered. The rest came very sporadically and some of them weren't even lukewarm by the time we got them even though we had been waiting 10 minutes. Everything had a grainy texture as if it had been frozen and reheated too many times. I'm not sure how the food is with the regular menu but I can assure everyone that it is better and far cheaper to buy the dim sum in the Asian supermarket frozen section next door than to order it from...

As a tourist to Kelowna, this is definitely my first and last time visiting this Japanese restaurant.

Almost all the rolls have cucumber in the ingredients, and all the ones we ordered had a "generous" portion of cucumber. There was no chopped scallops roll, but it was sold as the Vanilla Sky Roll for $11 (with lots of cucumber and little scallops). We also ordered their house roll, which is the smallest house roll (with no fish of any kind), it had a stick of imitated crab meat, some avocado, and lots of lettuce, LETTUCE used in Sushi? What kind of cheap house is this roll based off on? The house roll is priced as a specialty roll too, and at their specialty price too, like their chopped scallops roll. We also ordered the beef teriyaki roll, nothing much to talk about here, it's $6.

We also ordered udon for children, the soup was just plain msg and udon was so little I would call it a kids meal, but it was sold for $17. I kind of expect the serving would be at least 50% more....

We saw dim sum from other reviews, but it was only available in the morning.

Overall, don't expect too many...