Picante Sapporo Eki-mae Shop — Restaurant in Sapporo

Dear Picante,

First of all, I would have admitted the food your company provides is really good, but awful attitude towards foreigners is ruining your reputation. I will leave a “do not recommend Picante 札幌駅前店“ in google commentary after this mail.

Have regularly travelled to Japan over the last 20 years and this is the first time we have experienced such rude and unwelcoming behavior. To begin with we were told not to go inside the restaurant as we already walked through in big snow for 10 minutes with 2 kids and one elder and the restaurant is almost empty. What?! After we finished the food order with the bad attitude of the owner and one of his female staff, we waited over 20 minutes to get our curry. Customers ordered after us only needed to wait like 5 mins. Why?! Again, we have 2 kids, one is 3 years old and the other is 5 and one 65 years old elder. If the staffs really need to show their discrimination, please set kids and elders free. Absolutely not worth the trouble as plenty of other soup curry restaurants with better quality food. Limited level of English is not an excuse for rudeness towards non Japanese customers!!

Best regards, Customer just had bad luck to walk into an awful Picante restaurant at 17:00 on...

I’ve had Picante before at another branch and it was good. We thought of having it again but unfortunately the staff on the door was very rude. Here’s what happened, we were up next just outside the door and I was with our baby and the baby was feeling cold so we went in to just stand indoors to get him warm, and this lady staff angrily told us to get out. What’s upsetting was not that she told us we can’t stay indoors because I would’ve understood company policy but rather it was how she did it. She spoke to us like we were eating there for free or something. I’m pretty sure she would’ve spoken to us more politely had we been Japanese. We ended up leaving before we were ever seated because we understood that we’re not welcome there. They don’t want our money and likewise we don’t need their food.

I don’t know what she has against foreigners but that’s not cool. Perhaps she has had bad experiences with foreigners in the past, but to take it out on every foreigner is just...

Was actually going for ramen down the street but we stumbled on here and fancied soup curry so we took a chance. I had the crispy chicken with the yakuzen soup…..I have to say the soup surprised me…it was a good flavour, BUT there was very little of it. In the bowl there is a little platform where they lay the main topping and it takes up a significant amount of space in the bowl with the result that you’ll wish you ordered the 大盛りsize. The crispy chicken was , however, excellent. The batter was brilliant and very crispy (ironically because of that platform! 😂) Not so many vegetables as standard. I can’t remember the spice level, maybe 辛口, but they added chopped fresh chillies to it instead of dumping in paprika or chili powder which I thought was better. Tbf I think it’s a 3 star soup curry place but the crispy chicken and actual chopped chillies nudged it up...