Izakaya Mizuho — Restaurant in Kusatsu

The food here was decent but nothing special and not worth the price. The food takes forever to arrive after you've ordered online. Dont go here if you have places to be after because it takes 30-60 minutes to get your food after you place each order.

This place would honestly have been alright if wasn't for the owner's rude attitude towards foreigners. For context, Im half white and half Japanese and my Japanese isn't great but I try. There was some miscommunication over where to put our umbrellas upon entering. He pointed to the front where we placed them but he later brought them to our table looking annoyed...

One little thing became multiple things. We ordered a beef skewer then the owner came and took the plate away without any explanation...weird. We then waited another 10 minutes for the same dish to came back but this time with less meat. Progressively, we noticed less and less meat were on our skewers and they took longer and longer to arrive.

The last straw was when we ordered a few yakitori skewers. We waited 60 minutes and had to raise the issue to our waiter because we were now running late to a bath appointment. The other Japanese locals got their food much sooner.

We felt discriminated against and this will be the last time we go to this place. With that said, Kusatsu is a beautiful place with tons of other friendly establishments with friendly people. We won't let this one bad experience sour our visit to this cute little town. Just avoid this place if you don't look or speak...

If you're a foreigner visiting Kusatsu, do yourself a favour and avoid being racially discriminated against by the rude old man who owns the store.

I'm of Hong Kong descent and as soon as I entered I was greeted by the owner as he thought I was Japanese. However as soon as I told him I didn't speak English, his attitude completely changed and he refused to serve my wife and I. He made no effort to explain what he meant but uttered something in Japanese and said gome nasai sorry in Japanese. We went inside a second time to try and speak to an English speaking staff member just to make sense of what the owner really meant. The English speaking waiter asked us if we made a reservation, to which we said no and he just said that they were fully booked even though there were many empty seats inside.

I've heard of these stories of racial discrimination against foreigners many times before but to experience this first hand was utterly disappointing and saddening.

Do not visit this restaurant if you're...

Went for lunch, to get a taste of Gunma's signature udon: himokawa udon. Ordered hot Maitake Tempura Udon (1100yen) and hot Hanamaki Udon (850yen) which actually we wanted the Yuba Udon but we ordered it wrong at first lol so we ordered additional Yuba (600yen). They were super good! The soup were very well balanced, the udon's texture is in my opinion better than the usual udon that we've known in Tokyo. Maitake tempura was very delicious, there was none of the maitake smell that I used to smell. Yuba was really aromatic and chewy and goes really well with the soup, or just eat it by itself. Overall we were glad we decided to crash on this place for lunch. There was around 20-30mins wait for the 2 of us before seated and get our food served, but we think it's...