Sumibi to Wine — Restaurant in Kyoto

Awesome staff, so friendly even though we don't speak Japanese. Has an English menu and dining here requires you pay 400 yen table charge per person (which gets you a seat and complimentary salad - table charge is standard in Izakayas but 400 yen each is a bit high, but worth every cent once we tasted the food!).

When we arrived at 6pm the waiter said "xxx...xxx...8 o'clock". I didn't understand the first bit but I initially thought he meant we should come back at 8 (perhaps the person who said the staff are racist had this happen to them? I can see how the misunderstanding would occur).

After some confusion we realised he meant that the dining time is 2 hours (especially since they have a all you can drink package a dining time limit makes sense). 2 hours is way enough time to have a decent meal, especially considering that extended conversation is a bit hard here due to the staff enthusiastically yelling in Japanese at customers entering and leaving and at each other.

The drinks. There's a wide selection of wines but just 3 beers - normal, green and nonalcoholic. The normal beer was great and so smooth. The green beer was just that - spinach beer! It was awesome, I just loved it (I'm a green smoothie fan).

The food! We sat at the bar and watched it being cooked. It was all to die for. We had pickled cucumbers with Japanese mayonnaise, seared tuna, wagyu beef, french fries and fried gnocchi. Total for 2 people including table charge and 1 beer each was about 7000 yen. 1600 of that was for the beef so you could make the meal a little cheaper by substituting that. Totally worth every cent though.

If you are in Kyoto I can't recommend this place enough. I'm so glad we found this gem. We'll be back tomorrow before we...

Just had our Christmas dinner here. We are international visitors and weren’t sure if things would be open on Christmas Day, so we asked a friend to reserve a restaurant for us. He selected this one for a 2 hour time slot and I’m so glad he did. Price was very reasonable, and the service and food was great. For starters we ordered the eggplant raw duck, both me and my wife’s first time eating raw duck, and it was delicious. Our meal also came with bottomless salad (yes all you can eat salad) and whatever dressing on that salad was so good, we ate 2 bowls of just that. For our mains we had the wagyu beef and bacon carbonara pasta. We actually enjoyed the pasta more - it had a raw egg on top sitting in a bed of black pepper which was just what we were craving. I liked that the wagyu had coarse sea salt you could sprinkle on yourself, and the (real) wasabi you could smear on the beef was better than the typical horseradish we get with American steaks. The atmosphere is nice (nicer than casual but not uptight and stuffy), and they even give you a blanket to put on your lap if you’re cold. My wife had a nonalcoholic cold pressed green juice with soda water that she enjoyed and I had the cold pressed red juice sour that was balanced and paired well with the meal. I’m so grateful to my friend for this...

Food: you wait for 30min for two tiny pieces of meat. As waiting was written on the menu, not complaining about the time but the result. 3200JPY for this..? Just grab a normal chuckeye steak at supermarket. That will save your time and money.

Service: nothing special. That's why it is the problem. Be aware they give you salad as an appetiser and it is not included. Perhaps, you have to reject when they serve you. They said something like 'it is from us' however on the menu it is written they charge 600 JPY. Definitely an unexpected bill.

Atmosphere: McDonald's quality. Small, not comfortable, no privacy, table distance too close, you hear everything from other table plus noisy music choice. You don't want to spend more than 20min here. I made mistake and unlucky. So you don't have to.

Hey plz chill. It is only my opinion. What I am saying is that I wouldn't recommend it to my...