Watami Japanese Casual Restaurant (Causeway Bay) — Restaurant in Hong Kong Island

This used to be one of my favourite restaurants back in my childhood, and my family and I all enjoyed coming here (albeit a different branch), but we haven’t gone in over a decade. Unfortunately the quality of the food has gone way down. I don’t think I can even call it the same restaurant as the one I went in my childhood.

I ordered a kimchi hot stone rice and tuna sushi. The kimchi rice came with a laughably small portion of kimchi and beef. The small portion of beef I can kind of forgive, but the portion of kimchi was as if it was some side topping, even though it’s literally called kimchi rice, and the cost of kimchi is so inexpensive anyway. There was so little kimchi that I couldn’t mix it well with the rice, and overall the rice was lacking in flavour and unappetising. The tuna sushi wasn’t horrible, but for the price I would expect better. It’s like genki-level sushi but twice as expensive.

The service was also abysmal. I came at 5PM, and it was pretty much empty. Order was placed via QR code, and 20 minutes after I placed my order, my food had still not come. There were no waiters around me as I was seated in an obscure area, so I had to get out of my seat and go find a waiter to ask about my order. To which I had to wait another 10+ minutes for the rice and another ~20 minutes for the sushi. I also had to go fetch and pour a cup of water myself because they don’t give you water themselves. Despite this, they still have the audacity to charge a 10% service charge, when it’s pretty much self-service.

Extremely disappointed and will never come back, and would recommend going to any other japanese restaurants… it’s hard to be any...

They seem to prioritize their hot pots and dinner sets over other menu items, but my family and I all found something we enjoyed/wanted to order. The food was good and filling, and I have no complaints there, and you order through the QR code.

But the service is just okay. It seems like the front desk guy was unhappy that day or something bc he was a bit curt with us. We also asked for help for ordering some extra udon for the hotpot that we had already ordered, but the menu option was confusing since it kept asking us what broth we wanted with the udon. Not only was one of the options unintelligible (like none of us knew what the broth flavour was), but we were also confused as to why we needed broth when the udon would just go straight into the hotpot pot that already has soup. When we flagged down a server to help manually order it, she again asked us what broth, to which we said "none" and she just gave us a rude look. When the udon came, it nevertheless came with some dashi broth, so we just used it to top up the hotpots that were getting low.

Other than that, it was a normal experience at a normal restaurant that did not exceptionally exceed expectations but it was not...

Mediocre at best. This place is like a Japanese style Cha Chang Teng. Lots of tables, tons of staff who are busy trying to get you your orders ASAP to kick you out for more turnovers. We had to ask for a water refill 4 times and the bill 3 times (surprisingly) because they kept forgetting, only because there were too many tables to manage and no dedicated servers to a group of tables. It was scattered staff everywhere. There was a foul scent with the salmon sashimi and sushi which we had to send back and asked the server to seriously let the Sushi chef know to check if the fish he got was okay or other ppl could get sick. Went here on a whim and will never again. You’d get better food and service at a Tsui Wah or Tai...