Sushi Mountain — Restaurant in Whitby

First time here and will not be returning for AYCE at least. They have the smallest AYCE sushi menu we have seen so far, but also among the cheapest, so that's okay. We took a trip to Whitby especially based on the reviews, but were very disappointed. For AYCE we will stick with our usual go to spots 1298 Sushi in Pickering, August 8 in Hamilton (our top choice), or K&B Sushi in Etobicoke.

Positives: Good Maki rolls (some even excellent) and decent tempura. Very good Yakitori (we only tried 1).

Could be improved: Average hand rolls (very chewy Nori). All the servers were good, but our main server (a young lady) was very robotic and possessed no real customer skills (rather blunt and cold).

Negatives: Very poor sushi - fish was not fresh at all, very dry and rubbery. They served everything first and then had us wait for 15 minutes for Sushi (that too after we reminded that we didn't get our sushi order yet). Now comes the dessert order. Wife ordered Green tea ice-cream - typical AYCE green tea flavor (good). I ordered a scoop of mango ice-cream. When it came I asked the server if that was the mango flavor (as it had a deep orange color) or is that someone else's order. She confirmed it's mango and asked to try it. Not mango (tasted more like artificial orange flavor you would find in cookies). I said I don't like the flavor (not a fan of orange flavor, and mango is my favorite flavor) and asked her to take it back. She calls another guy (I guess manager) and tells him "he doesn't want it." Then he started the unnecessary 5 mins long argument (which felt like forever) defending the "mango ice-cream" as having the correct mango flavor. Why is it relevant what he thinks is the right flavor? A customer doesn't like it, so take it as feedback and move on. But no, he asked at which other sushi place have we had a better mango ice-cream (which would be almost all the AYCE places that carry this flavor), then he started talking about supply-chain, and how it's not possible we could have had a different mango ice-cream at any other sushi place. How arrogant and unnecessary? Then finishes off saying that in all his time at this restaurant he never had a customer complain about the flavor of an ice-cream and how he thinks it's so weird (?), and walked away saying something to the other server in another language. WTH? We felt really uncomfortable and attacked at that point, and decided to just pay and leave. Never...

Yeah, I’m never going back here again.

The food tastes alright. Karaage was so salty (and misspelled as KAGAGE on the menu btw) and didn’t give us any sauce for it. Both the chicken and pork katsu were dry and the breading was so hard from being overcooked. Shrimp tempura was caked in batter with the skinniest sliver of shrimp in it (more on that below). They use deep fried tempura for the spicy salmon roll (why) and they’re “grilled shrimp” is so oily they probably drowned in it. Oh, and, I didn’t know stale ice cream existed until today.

If you’re craving just sushi, a small amount will serve to satisfy that, but for $50 I would argue that this place isn’t worth for AYCE.

But the biggest kicker is that the quality of their service is trash. Really, that old lady is the worst.

We were grateful for how accommodating they were (we had asked for 2 ppl AYCE and 1 person à la carte) and they had disclosed we were not allowed to share, so we didn’t mind that they were watching over us.

HOWEVER, I did NOT appreciate that the old lady told me that I was not allowed to pick off the excess breading on the shrimp tempura, even though there was literally way too much on it, and I didn’t even order a lot (I ordered ten and picked off the excess breading for three). She said, “next time you can’t take off the batter”. Don’t worry, old hag, there won’t be a next time.

Then there was the weird occurrence with our tempura sauce. We were given two bowls and we had asked them to take it away along with our empty plates because we weren’t using them. The server insisted on leaving one in case we changed our mind, so we said, “OK”. When we had run out of food that the tempura sauce made sense with, we then put that second bowl of tempura sauce on the empty plate again. Without a word, that old lady removed the tempura sauce bowl from said empty plate and left it on our table.

Then, as we finished our meal and asked for dessert, the old lady asked for how we wanted to split the bill while we were eating dessert, as if in a rush to make us leave. She then proceeded to watch over my shoulder while I paid. When it was my sister’s turn to pay, my sister said she did not need the receipt and the old lady proceeded to throw the unwanted receipt on the table.

Even my 5% tip felt wasted on such poor service. I wouldn’t recommend...

Where to begin... We were a table of 11, and were there for my mother's birthday for the AYCE sushi. The food was ok I guess? but as the night progressed, we noticed a few things:

the non-sushi items took forever (they didn't bring out the noodles, beef spare ribs, or fried salmon belly until the very end of the meal) although they had no problems serving out the tempura, miso soup or salads quickly (ie the more expensive non-sushi items were delayed until the very end) I noticed that the rice they used for the fried rice was really really heavy and I mentioned it to everyone at the table and they all said the same thing about the rice in their sushi (that it was more filling than normal - and it seemed like there was a lot in the sushi). We are a family of Asians that eat rice almost everyday and we all noticed 'something' about the rice, so it's not like we imagined this. the tables seemed a little cramped in but this is nothing different from a lot of the Asian restaurants I've gone to in Markham and Scarborough

But what really ticked me off was 2 things:

near the end of the meal, I ordered more salmon sashimi. They came back and told me that they ran out, and I figured that they were being honest so I changed it to get a few more pieces of tuna, snapper and mackerel. No biggie - clearly not as good as salmon but whatever. A few minutes later another table of 10+ people came in and were seated next to us. They ordered salmon sashimi and our entire table literally saw the waiter serve them a massive platter of it (maybe around 100+ pieces?). You couldn't miss it. WTF?

When the bill came, the waitress told us that they added the tip to the bill (10% tip calculated after the tax is added on). There's nothing in the restaurant that says that they do this but whatever.

IMO, this food was ok. Nothing great but not awful either but this place likes to market itself as an AYCE restaurant but they got caught lying to us about 'running out' of certain items when they clearly did not.

Live and learn. We are never coming...