Gyukaku Namba Sennichimae — Restaurant in Osaka

I should have read the reviews about the horrible service and staff attitude before wasting my time, money and ruining what should have been a fun time at my favorite Japanese restaurant chain. Make sure you read all the other reviews of this place.

Visiting Japan I didn't think there was any place with horrible customer service.... until we went to this Gyu-kaku location in February 2023. I live a few blocks from a Gyu-kaku back home and I love the food and the service. This Gyu-kaku in Namba had the worse service of any restaurant I have ever been to in Japan.

They seated us on the floor above the main floor of the restaurant. We were the only table that didn't get an iPad to order. Even politely asking for the iPad or simple things like tongs, plates and napkins seemed to have insulted the servers like I had the audacity to not use my hands to cook or eat off the bare table.

It gets worse! Our time limit was up thirty minutes early because they seated us on their second floor above the main floor of the restaurant and we were the last customers left and they wanted to clean and mop the floors and get rid of us. Why couldn't the restaurant seat us on the main floor if they had planned to close off the second floor early. When we went down to the main floor it was PACKED full of customers unlike the deserted second floor where we were seated.

I was extremely disappointed with this Gyu-kaku restaurant. When I got back home and went to my favorite neighborhood Gyu-kaku I shared my horrible experience at the Namba location with them. I'll never go back to the Namba Gyu-kaku ever again. If I can give this restaurant ZERO...

Multiple lapses in service. Ordered 1 wagyu platter and 1 normal beef platter, but server sent 2 beef platters instead. It's a very tall server with earrings and seems like quite a young chap, we were there Thursday evening. When I asked him which one was the wagyu platter, he said there wasn't any. I replied "no, my order has 1 wagyu and 1 normal beef", then he suddenly said "oh!" Looked at his order sheet and pointed to a random beef platter and said that was the wagyu. Believing him, we just ate away but something felt off cos it definitely didn't taste like wagyu. This turned out to be a lie when I ordered another wagyu platter (which arrived correctly), and saw that was how the wagyu platter was supposed to look like. Explaining this whole situation is incredibly hard to the staff as they only understand basic English. Also had some other orders messed up: ordered 2 white rice, only 1 arrived. Ordered 2 basil chicken, only 1 arrived. So to summarize, it's surprising that even with a systemized qr code ordering menu they still manage to get the orders wrong. They comped us 3 free all-you-can-drink add-ons as service recovery after all the back and forth, but honestly that was just 1500yen total and not even the cost of a wagyu platter. Versus the whole lying thing and the frustration of their inability to follow a systemized table order until you point it out to them 'hey this is missing, this is wrong', I would highly not recommend this outlet as their service training seems to be the worst amongst the...

We went on Saturday night 8pm. Wait was not bad for a weekend. We got the 90min AYCE. The food was okay/tasted good. The worst part was the service. The meats came out VERY slow and staff tried to make us leave even though we did not get our last order until 10 minutes before time was up. Here is a break down:

First round of meat order arrived approximately 35 minutes after. We got all the vegetables 10-15 minutes first.

Second round of order came after the hour.

Last order, we put in 30 minutes before time was up. We got to our last order of meat with 20 minutes later (10 minutes left to eat) before the time was up and they forgot half the food. Then they tried to rush/hurry us up to leave and asked us if we can try to cook everything and eat within 5 minutes.

They gave us our one per person dessert which came fast but we didn’t get our food. We left hungry and unhappy.

The restaurant was 25% full by 2130 hour and they were not closing yet. Horrible service....