Wagyu Ryotei Bungo Gion — Restaurant in Kyoto

TOURIST TRAP ALERT: Do not visit this restaurant if you want a good meal. This place is a total tourist trap, and unfortunately we fell for it. All the 5-star Google reviews are because at the end of your meal, they incentivize you with a “special treat” (sweets) if you write them a good review. Don’t buy it.

FOOD: just mediocre/ borderline bad. Not worth the $300 price tag. It is arranged on the plate to look “fancy” and “high end”, but in reality, the food was so bland and mediocre. You can tell they don’t use high quality ingredients. For the over $300 we spent, it should be the best meal of our lives! It was barely worth $50.

SERVICE: the waitress was nice, but she could barely speak English. They make it out to try and be and “educational/informational” experience where they tell you about the different cuts of meat, but we could not understand her. But we are in Japan, so honestly not that big of a deal if she doesn’t speak great English. What was worse was it seemed like her first day on the job, she didn’t know how to handle the tools and there was not enough space on the table for all the plates so she had to put dirty plates on the floor at one point…. Also they rice they brought us was old rice from another table! The waitress realized it when she was serving us and had it taken back.

AMBIENCE: we got the private room which was a totally scam. $5,500 yen per person (~$40) and the ambience was horrible. Firstly, the overall cleanliness of the place was not good. The tatami mat floors were dirty, there were moths on the room wall, the room was hot and you could turn on a mini-split AC unit, when we did that, the air blowing in smelled like cat litter. My husband had to sit with the cat litter air blowing on him all night😂😩 he was not happy. The bathroom was also not very clean. The lighting, music, and overall ambience of the private room was not good.

PRICE: first issue was had with the place when we walked in was they force you to order a drink, we already knew that we’d be spending a lot on the meal and didn’t feel like ordering alcohol, but my husband ordered a beer and I had to get a water. The water was 1,000 yen for a small glass bottle and the beer was the smaller beer ever! I just hate when places make you pay for water, it’s such a scam, like just give me the free tap water please. The cost of the meal was NOT WORTH IT. For over $300 it better be damn good food, and it was not.

This place is the definition of a...

I will start by saying that if you have allergies, you should avoid the restaurant at all costs. I will separate the review into two areas: the food and our incident.

The food It is good with some courses that are great, the first course (salad) was great, the second one was good in flavor but the quality of the beef skirt left to be desired, the third was great and the 4th was meh… that is when our meal finished prematurely.

Our incident In our family, we have some life threatening allergies which we notified the restaurant during the reservation process. After arriving to the restaurant, we confirmed with the waitress and she confirmed that they had the allergy list and I confirmed the ingredient that is extremely dangerous for my wife.

During our meal, everything was good until the “Beef tail soup” arrived, where after close inspection we found the previously mentioned ingredient and notified the restaurant; there was a mistake and they gave us the food from someone else and would change it for the correct one. We asked them to be extra careful again since this could cause a bad allergic reaction.

The next course arrived, we ask the waiter if it had the ingredient… he said no. Since the waiter wasn’t serving us, we waited for our waitress to be back and asked her again… she said no. After the double confirmation, we proceeded to eat and then saw the ingredient hidden in the salad.

My wife started to have an allergic reaction, thankfully we have our EPIPEN and Benadryl with us all the time. We notified the restaurant and they took our food away.

We decided that we would leave to our hotel since we were worried of our wellbeing and wanted to ask for the bill so we could go; we waited for several minutes for someone to arrive to our counter seat… it never happened. We had to ask for someone to come and asked her to charge us so we can leave ASAP. We were able to leave the restaurant after a quick chat with our waitress.

The most disappointing was the chef reaction, he was always behind the kitchen and only said “Sorry” and hide there. That is not a professional behavior neither the customer service excellence that we are used to in higher end restaurants in Japan.

Price doesn’t align with the quality of the beef and the service provided at the restaurant. The restaurant is in a beautiful building but it isn’t worth the price, there is better much better wagyu in...

We had a little bit of higher expectations for the amount of money that their menus cost.

First of all, the culinary team makes a great effort and the concept is a good idea. However, :

it is a degustation menu so in the end of the 10 course menu you are still not full. you must take a drink which comes with an extra charge and this is the rule of the restaurant so basically you cannot say no which I find a bit unprofessional. It should be my choise if I will drink a wine or a mocktail. we went exclusively for the meat but all the portions were so small so we did not have this satisfactory feeling in the end. Also, the quality is not the best or the way the cook it is not the best. I am not sure. in general the presentation was outdated for example the first plate with the burrata. in terms of the service our waiter did not provide sufficient information about the concept of each plate and ingredient. Also, the service has a space of improvement because the level of the culinary team is higher. They push for named reviews that is why it has this amount and apart from that, the waiter asked us to show him that we indeed left a review online before we leave. The last weird point was a Geisha that took pictures with everyone and gave some small treats along with a sticker with her name. I am not sure why. Maybe to write a review for her as well 😂

As a final conclusion we would not come back in this restaurant. It is a kind of a tourist trap. In the same area there are similar options which are more...