GAKU — Restaurant in Athens

The food is quite good, I don't think you will be disappointed there (well, maybe the otoro was more like chu toro and the pieces were a bit inconsistently made especially wasabi-wise), but the service is not up to par, especially for Fri-Sat, so I will probably not go again at least on those days. To elaborate, on Fri-Sat there is a 2 hour table policy, which has never been a problem for me in the past. We started with the order of our miso, edamame, salad, tataki. They were all nice, except the salad came about 20 mins AFTER we had finished everything else (and edamame is the slowest to eat dish, so took a while) and they even forgot a side plate for one of us. We had to flag them down to order our sushi after we finished as it was starting to get late. So we gave the order in the traditional order, ikura/crab/amaebi, then three types of white fish, followed by the otoro & salmon. We asked if they would come all together or otherwise if the order is roughly like it should, and the server told us it will be random. We said, ok at least leave the tuna and salmon for last and he seemed really puzzled (this is very standard, it should not sound strange at all to trained staff) and told us the others take longer to make, at which point we said ok we'll just deal with it and sort the eating order ourselves. So in the end they brought them all together. But we noticed the seabass was missing at that point so we had to again ask for that. By the time we finished the seabass and had decided to finish with some eel, again trying to call on a waiter, they just handed the bill as our 2 hours were up. So, you can try it, again the actual food was good, but better avoid Fri-Sat, and/or perhaps don't have expectations for a Japanese style meal and just order everything and just eat as they come :) I do expect less frustration for a €40-50/pp restaurant. I was also not clear on whether they offer sashimi (like, without the rice), as there is a combined "nigiri/sashimi" section in the menu which does not specify it as an option. I was going to ask to get some extra salmon sashimi, so would have asked, but it was when I got...

I went there with a friend with again the intention to wash down all of the 2 euro gyros we have ate, as a last night dine in to spend a bit on a higher end restaurant.

To summarize, the food was great, I really liked the quality of it and you could see that they take care of each dish. The only problem was a problem with the my flavor profile which everyone has a different one, Ill explain. The chef really likes the taste if anise, as someone who learned culinary in school I know that some of my chefs great or not had their own unique niche and some liked Anise some didn’t, some black pepper some white. And thats fine, but for me the heavy anise flavor which was apparent in many dishes like the octopus, sea bass nagiri and the salmon tataki. Is not the best idea.

Other than that we booked online and when we came they didnt know we are coming, took them a minute to clean our table. We added a notice that it is my birthday and they didnt mind that even though we bought a little of dishes to satisfy something

The server was really nice, wrote down everything on a piece of paper which is always a plus.

The menu was a web menu which personally I hate, looks cheap and not intuitive for the client.

If they offer you water dint forget to ask for tap and not pay for the big bottle.

In general I would recommend sticking to Sushi rolls and not the other things as they were average at best. But then again, for a fancy Japanese restaurant the...

Worst meal after a week in Greece, and one of the least impressive Japanese restaurant experiences I have ever had anywhere.

Sharing a list of some of the issues faced: No cocktails at all given they had no barman (and based on previous reviews it seems as if this has been ongoing for a few days-perhaps warn your customers when they reserve so they can go elsewhere if they perhaps want cocktails on a Saturday night - yes, crazy idea I know!).

-Very rushed service where they brought out the side dishes for the main courses when we were still eating appetizers. We asked them to keep them until we were ready, and when we did get them, they were cold (so they had just kept them in the kitchen and brought them back 15min later). 20 euros for two portions of cold sweet potato is not my idea of good value. Rest of service was way too rushed and you felt they just wanted to get you out of the door for next customers - strange given restaurant was not even half full, given we had an early dinner and had plenty of time until we had to vacate our table.

So all in all, average food, bad service with zero effort to correct their mistakes and poor value for money (twice the amount spent compared to all our previous meals in Greece and not even...